


Blank Space

by Closeted_Bookworm



Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Best Friends, Blankgameplays - Freeform, Gen, Memory Loss, No Cursing, Platonic Relationships, Psychic Abilities, Real Life, Self-blaming, Supernatural Elements, Thriller, YouTubers - Freeform, amyplier is adorable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:40:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23973184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Closeted_Bookworm/pseuds/Closeted_Bookworm
Summary: Ethan has been having memory issues lately. He tries to keep it together as long as he can, but things take a drastic turn for the worse and he, Mark, and Amy end up in a race to find a way to save Ethan's mind from a vengeful entity straight out of their nightmares before his memories are gone for good.
Relationships: Mark Fischbach & Ethan Nestor, Mark Fischbach/Amy Nelson
Comments: 35
Kudos: 104





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, so this is my first big fic, so I really hope you guys like it! A little background: Ethan is single since I could only handle so many characters at once (so no Mika, I love her though and wish them the best). Also, I know it’s OOC, but there’s no cursing in here. Sorry if that matters to you. 
> 
> I’m not sure how fast I’ll be uploading chapters, I might just do the whole thing at once since it’s finished already. 
> 
> I would absolutely love it if you could leave me a comment! I thrive off of feedback, so let me know what you think. (no pressure though) <3

“That should do it,” Ethan said under his breath, leaning back and surveying the freshly completed flowerbed. One of the goals he made when he moved into his new house was to plant a garden, and now, two months later, he had finally made good on that promise to himself. There were poppies, lavender, marigolds, and a young orange tree in the corner by the gate that practically glowed under the blinding Los Angeles sun. The robust little sapling, which he’d put in the week before, was his favorite thing in the yard. The dense soil of his front yard had not made it easy on him, but in the end all the time spent digging the hole to plant the tree had been well worth it. It was doing well besides a few yellow leaves, and he hoped it would produce a large harvest as it matured. Today he had put in the last of the flowers and mulched the whole area. Wanting to take a picture of the finished garden, he reached into his pocket for his phone, but it wasn’t there. He rolled his eyes and walked back inside to look for it. There was no telling where he might have left it; he misplaced it on a regular basis. 

He’d been having trouble remembering all sorts of things lately, as a matter of fact. He didn’t know what was up with his brain, but all of a sudden he was forgetting things that he normally had no trouble remembering. Just little things, like where he’d left his keys or what he’d had for breakfast that morning, but it was happening often enough that it was beginning to worry him. He’d even forgotten to feed Spencer last night, which he hadn’t done once in the five years he’d had his dog. He would have just written it off as part of being human, or his ADHD, if it hadn’t been happening so frequently. 

He at last found his phone on his bedside table, though he certainly didn’t remember leaving it there. He could have sworn he’d pocketed the device when he got dressed that morning, and he hadn’t been in his bedroom since then. He wondered if he’d somehow gotten a concussion or something that had given him a memory issue, though he wasn’t showing any of the other symptoms when he looked it up. He did accidentally hit his head rather hard on the headboard after a nightmare a couple days ago; maybe that was it? 

That was another thing. He had never had a problem with insomnia or night terrors in the past, but he kept jolting awake at ridiculous hours of the morning, tears streaking down his face and shivering violently. He couldn’t even remember what had woken him. Come to think of it, maybe his newfound forgetfulness was a result of sleep deprivation. He sighed and resolved to get more rest that night. He wandered back into the kitchen, phone in hand, now trying to remember what he needed it for in the first place. He stopped by the window, staring out at the flowerbed he’d just planted, before smacking his own forehead at his own stupidity and ducking outside to take a picture.

┈┈┈┈┈

That night, Ethan startled awake at three in the morning. Three in the morning! He angrily dashed the tears from his eyes and reached to his left to turn on the light, only to have his fingers rake through empty air. He made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat, then turned over and turned on the lamp that had sat on the table to his _right_ for the entire time he’d owned it, even in his old place. He laid back down and groaned, resigned to laying awake for at least an hour. At least he didn’t have any plans for tomorrow.

He was sick of being exhausted and distracted all the time, and his nerves were shot. What was the matter with him? He hadn’t hit his head or gone through a traumatizing event or seen anything even remotely frightening, and he couldn’t think of anything else that would cause something like this. And it was not helping matters that his body always seemed to decide that the best way to recover from a nightmare was to stew over it long enough for the adrenaline to work out of his system before giving him the chance to fall back asleep. It was a lucky night indeed that he managed to sleep for longer than a six-hour stretch. 

He flopped out of bed to turn off his alarm. He was going to do his absolute best to sleep until noon tomorrow. He had a video lined up for tomorrow already, and his circadian rhythm could stand one day out of his schedule.

┈┈┈┈┈

Ethan woke up around ten the next morning; the only thing that made him get out of bed at all was the sound of his phone informing him he had a new text message. Yawning and stretching, he stared with bleary vision at his phone across the room as it buzzed insistently. He reluctantly rolled out of bed to see who could possibly be texting him. He smiled when Mark’s name showed up on the screen.

_Hey, Ethan, where are you? We were supposed to start filming fifteen minutes ago._

His eyes widened and he sprang into action, firing off a quick apology to Mark and rushing to get dressed, angrily berating himself. He had completely forgotten they were supposed to start filming a new batch of videos today. 

He stuck a piece of toast into his mouth, tugged on his jacket, and ran out the door. Ten seconds later, he ran back in, grabbed his keys, and was gone again.

┈┈┈┈┈

After another week, Ethan felt like he was losing his mind. He was almost afraid to set anything down at this point, because he would almost certainly forget where he left it. He wrote everything down in an effort to stay on top of his schedule, but then he couldn’t even find the lists he made. And he’d run his phone through the wash two days ago after he forgot to take it out of a sweatshirt pocket, so he couldn’t set reminders either. He was reaching his breaking point. He just couldn’t take much more of this ridiculous scatterbrained nonsense. He’d taken to writing reminders on his arms and hands, the only things he couldn’t misplace. He hurriedly wrote his latest note, _supplies shopping with Mark on Tuesday,_ on the underside of his left arm. It just had to last for three days. He hoped he would remember to rewrite it after his shower. He slapped a sticky note onto the bathroom mirror to remind himself to do it.

He’d gone to the doctor the day before to confirm he didn’t have a concussion (he didn’t), and just to get his head in general looked at, but they sent him on his way with a clean bill of health and instructions to get more sleep. There was not much he could do on that front, however. His sleep pattern was nonexistent at this point, and depending on the night he could get anywhere from eight hours to two. The other day he’d been so tired that he tried to swipe his driver's license to pay at the gas station. Then he’d discovered that he had forgotten his credit card.

┈┈┈┈┈

Ethan was incredibly frustrated. He irritably concentrated on his black phone screen, silently willing it to turn on, but it stubbornly remained dead as a doornail. Mark had left his GoPro at his house after filming, and Ethan was sure he’d forget to return it. Now he couldn’t even call him to come get it. How did his phone even get broken? He hadn’t dropped it. The last time he looked at it, it was a perfectly capable cellular device. As he stared daggers at the broken phone, his vision started fading and he hurriedly sat down on the floor and braced himself.

Blinding pain stabbed through his head, as sharp and intense as a bullet. The phone fell out of his hands, cracking like a whip on tile. He sucked in shallow breaths through clenched teeth, wincing as the pain spiked again, coming and going in waves before ebbing away into a dull ache. He pulled himself into a kitchen chair and cradled his head in his hands, his eyesight gradually returning. He’d been getting these splitting headaches once or twice a day for two, no four, three days? He was no longer sure, but this was his third one today. After the first couple, he’d gone to the nearest urgent care facility, but they’d only sent him home with a promise to look for a potential cause and over-the-counter migraine medicine that did nothing against the pain. 

A loud knock echoed through the kitchen, causing him to whimper a little as his skull vehemently protested the loud noise. His head felt like it might explode, and his ears were ringing slightly. He slowly lifted himself out of the chair and walked to the door, his head buzzing strangely. His vision was kind of fuzzy, just a little bit out of focus. 

Mark waited apprehensively on the doorstep, twisting the strap of his bike helmet and mentally chiding himself for leaving his camera at Ethan’s house. He’d noticed his friend had seemed a little out of it that day and knew he’d been having trouble sleeping, so he’d resolved to leave him alone and let him take it easy. Yet here he was, back again after only an hour or two. After an uncomfortably long wait, Ethan swung open the door, and he immediately regretted bothering him again. He was pale and peaked, and he looked like he’d just dragged himself out of bed.

“Sorry Ethan, I think I left my GoPro here this morning, could I come in and look for it quick? I’m really sorry if I woke you…” He trailed off, noticing just how dazed and confused his friend appeared. 

“Hey, are you okay? You’re not looking too great.”

Ethan seemed to snap out of a trance, his usual silly grin popping back into existence. “Hey buddy, what brings you here?”

Mark blinked, the sudden shift in expression jarring. “Um… I just told you. My camera, remember?”

His smile seemed plastered to his cheeks. “Your camera? Oh, I didn’t see it. Come in, we’ll look for it. When did you leave it here?”

“Just this morning. I think I left it on the counter, you really didn’t see it?”

When they rounded the corner and walked into the kitchen, he sighed in relief when he saw the camera resting on the table, but a frown creased his face when he went to pick it up. 

“You just told me that you hadn’t seen it, but you left yourself a _note_ to give it back to me,” he accused, holding up a small yellow post-it with a distinctive cramped script scrawled across it. Ethan’s eyes widened. 

“But I didn’t write that!” he exclaimed, his smile cracking at the edges, “I haven’t even been in the kitchen today except to get breakfast.”

Worry for his friend flooded his mind, all sorts of alarm bells ringing in his brain. “Ethan,” he said slowly, “we filmed for two hours this morning in your kitchen.”

His brow furrowed, the smile finally flaking away. “I… wha?” The buzzing in his head was growing louder, like an angry hornet crashing around in his brain. He could hear Mark’s concerned voice, but it was muffled, like cotton was stuffed in his ears. The hornet in his mind redoubled its efforts, and he whimpered as the pain sliced through his head. It wanted out, it wanted to get _out_ of him, and he didn’t know how to let it out, it was getting worse, louder, harder, sharper, chipping away at him, it was destroying him, he just wanted it to stop… 

“Woah!” Mark yelled, lunging forward to catch Ethan as his eyes rolled back into his head and he crumpled. He grunted as the completely dead weight hit him and eased both of them shakily to the floor. “Ethan? Ethan!” He grabbed his wrist, the air whooshing out of his lungs in relief when he felt a pulse beneath his fingers. It was strong, but erratic, like it was supercharged and trying to rip out of his arm. He glanced at Ethan’s face and blanched; his eyes were still rolled back and his face was contorted into an expression of such utter terror that it was hard to look at. He didn’t know what to do. He reached for his phone, intending to call 9-1-1, but a hand grabbed his arm roughly, preventing him from reaching it. 

“No,” he growled in a guttural voice, “No hospital.” 

Mark stared with scared eyes at his friend, slowly retracting his hand. He was now muttering under his breath, his face still twisted in fear. As he watched, frozen, his muttering slowly quieted. His death grip on Mark’s arm gradually loosened, and his eyes closed. Mark was rooted to the floor by shock. After a few minutes, common sense kicked back in and he cautiously picked him up and carried him inside to the couch. He sat down on the rug, anxious thoughts running through his head at a million miles a minute. He thought about going to get Ethan’s EpiPen, but this sure didn’t look like any allergic reaction he’d ever seen. As time ticked by, he grew progressively more worried as the other man still remained unconscious. Finally, after ten excruciatingly long minutes, he heard him groan faintly. Quickly looking up, he saw him sluggishly blinking and peering owlishly around him. 

“Wha happened?” he slurred. 

“Oh, thank goodness.” He punched him lightly on the arm. “Don’t you dare do that again!”

“Do what?” He sat up a little straighter. “Did I fall asleep on the couch?”

“You passed out. Your eyes rolled back into your head! What’s the matter? Are you okay? Sick?”

“I passed out? Wait, how did you even get into my house? Did I forget to lock the door again?”

“ _You_ let me in. Plus I have a copy of the key.” Mark said. He sat back on his heels and thought for a moment about what Ethan had said, desperately hoping the only problem was he was still half-asleep. Alarming possibilities swirled in his mind as he anxiously slotted clues into place. “Ethan, can you tell me what you did this morning?”

Ethan automatically opened his mouth, then furrowed his brow and closed it. 

“No…” he hesitantly said, “What… What did I do this morning? Why can’t I remember?” His voice was rising in pitch and the first sparks of panic were beginning to dance in his eyes as he racked his brains, trying desperately to remember something, anything, from that morning. 

“O-okay, then,” Mark stammered. He was _seriously_ worried. “I think I’m just going to call Amy and get her to pick us up in her car. I’ll come back for my bike later. I think we should go get your head looked at. I’ll feed Spencer if you end up staying at the hospital longer.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and started dialing in her number. 

“Yeah… I think that’s a good idea,” his voice quavered. “So who’s Amy?”

Mark’s head snapped back up. “Do you not remember her at all? You’ve known her for years.” How serious was this memory loss?

“No, I can’t remember anyone named Amy… I knew her for that long?” His voice cracked. “I forgot her after that long?”

Mark’s tight-lipped nod caused tears to spring to Ethan’s eyes. “What happened to me? What else did I forget? How will I even know if I’ve forgotten something?” His breaths started coming faster and faster, catching in brief panic when Mark grabbed his shoulders, but he only pulled him into a tight hug. He relaxed the tiniest bit in the embrace as tears started leaking from the corners of his eyes. 

“Hey, calm down a little for me, okay? We’re going to find out what’s going on. Panicking isn’t going to help anything.”

He clutched his best friend tightly, tears now flowing steadily down his cheeks. They sat there for a while, Mark murmuring reassurances to him as he eventually calmed his breathing. When he finally pulled away, his eyes were red and puffy, but he was much calmer. 

“Can you show me a picture of Amy?” he softly requested. Mark unlocked his phone and held it up for him to see. A photo of his girlfriend’s beaming face smiled up from his home screen. He stared intensely at the photo, stubbornly struggling to pull a memory from some far corner of his mind. 

“I… recognize her, I think,” he finally said, “She looks familiar and I can hear her laugh, but it feels like she’s someone I met once and never talked to again.”

“Well, that’s something, at least,” Mark said, standing up and walking towards the hallway. “I’m going to call her now,” 

One brief phone call later, he walked back into the room. “She’s coming. I told her that you needed help, but I wasn’t sure how to tell her why over the phone,” he said a little sheepishly. 

“Okay.” 

Mark plopped down on the couch next to him, wrapping one arm comfortingly around his shoulders. 

“Why don't we try to figure out what you do remember?” he ventured. “Tell me about the most recent memory you have.”

“Last night,” he said immediately, “Or I’m pretty sure it was last night. I remember waking up from a nightmare again.”

“What was it about?”

“I can’t remember that, but I’ve been having them for a while. I never remember the dream that woke me.”

“I wonder if the same thing is causing both the nightmares and the amnesia,” he commented. “At least that’s pretty recent. What do you remember from yesterday?”

“I think I had a sandwich for lunch.”

“Do you remember what was on it?”

“It’s fuzzy… jam, I think? And maybe peanut butter?”

“But you’re allergic to peanuts.” 

“I am?” he exclaimed. “I can’t remember my own allergies?” Mark saw him starting to work himself up again and quickly pulled him into another hug. 

“Hey, focus on me, all right? Tell me what you know about me.”

“Pies,” Ethan sputtered quickly, as if afraid these memories would wither and fade too. “I remember us making pies for a video. You thought mine looked like demon-spawn.” He chuckled breathlessly. “And dumplings. You make really good chicken dumplings,” He took a deep breath. “You love improv and you hate mannequins.”

“Good. It’ll be okay, all right? We’re going to drive to the ER and get you checked out.”

_It will be okay,_ Mark thought. It had to be.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stuff really starts going down in this chapter. :)

A couple hours had passed since the three of them had left Ethan’s house. They had filled Amy in on the situation when she arrived, though it took some convincing on their part to reassure her it wasn’t some elaborate prank. She was more than a little freaked out that Ethan couldn’t remember her, and she quickly agreed to drive the two of them to the hospital. They spent the majority of that afternoon in and out of various offices, and at this point Ethan was thoroughly exasperated and more than a little scared. He wanted to scream. There was nothing wrong with him. They couldn’t find _anything_ wrong with him. His brain function was infuriatingly perfect. But here he was, large chunks of his memory missing, and no one could figure out why. 

He stayed overnight at the hospital, but they had to release him the next afternoon.

“There’s no point in you staying any longer,” the doctor told him. “There’s nothing we can do for you right now. We’ll contact you if we find anything, but the best thing you can do at the moment is go home, take it easy, and let us know if anything additional develops.”

Ethan called Mark from the hospital phone (he’d left him a note with his phone number), and he and Amy picked him up. 

“Any news?”

“Nothing. But they said they’d get back to me.”

They started the drive back to Mark and Amy’s house in silence. Ethan’s stomach was twisted up into knots. There was always the chance the hospital would unravel his problem, but the neurologist he had spoken to was not optimistic. He pressed his forehead against the window, staring blankly at buildings he didn’t recognize and wondering how much of the scenery he should be able to remember. 

Mark looked back over his shoulder at his friend; he was slumped despondently over, a lost and dazed expression on his face. He always hated seeing him upset, but he’d never seen him this stressed and worried before. He turned back around, letting his focus blur as he ruminated on what could possibly cause something like this. The only thing he could think of was that he had hazardous chemicals or something similar in his house. Or maybe under it? Ethan had only been living in his new house for a month or two, maybe prolonged exposure to something in the area was to blame. That didn’t explain why the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, though. Maybe he had hit his head and just didn’t remember it. Again, though, the doctors probably would have found something. 

At some point during the half hour drive, Ethan dozed off. His awkward position against the car window made him snore softly, and Mark chuckled a little. The poor guy probably desperately needed sleep. After a few minutes, however, he heard a soft, pained groan from the back seat. He turned and saw him shivering and murmuring, his face distorted by fear and eyes still shut tight. He quickly asked Amy to pull over, then he climbed into the back to sit next to him, gently shaking his shoulder. 

“Wake up, you’re having a nightmare,” Mark shook him a little harder. “Come on, buddy, you need to wake up!”

Ethan gasped and his eyes shot open. Mark sighed in relief, but then Ethan let out a yell that made his ears ring ,and Amy turned around with a surprised shout. Ethan’s hand shot out, grabbing his friend’s wrist so tightly that Mark could feel the bones grinding painfully together. A small note of discomfort escaped his throat. He looked at his friend with hurt glinting in his eyes, but the sight of his face made the choice words of protest die in his throat. Ethan’s lips were curled back and he was snickering savagely, the sound ragged and frightening, but the truly terrifying thing was his eyes. His eyes were pitch black. The irises, the scleras, everything. He looked unhinged and feral, and Mark was unable to look away, his stomach fluttering in panic. Ethan twitched and shuddered, his muscles spasming, but his grip on Mark’s arm never wavered. Ethan slowly and jerkily turned to face him, a creepy grin spreading across his face and his neck bent at an uncomfortable-looking angle. 

“I told ya before that a hospital would do no good,” he rasped. A devilish glint appeared in his eyes. “There are quite a lot of strong memories in your friend’s pretty head. He must be a very emotional person.”

“What are you?” Mark whispered. Whatever this was, it certainly was _not_ Ethan talking. 

“I’m not sure, actually,” the creature mused, “but whatever I am, it’s his fault for bothering me,” His neck popped back upright and he licked his lips, a wisp of what looked like red smoke escaping his mouth. “This one has spent a lot of time with dogs. Those memories are always especially satisfying.”

“Get out of him!” Mark furiously exclaimed. The creature abruptly increased pressure on his wrist, and he gave a strangled yelp and pulled at the fingers crushing his arm. The entity’s soulless black eyes started flickering at the sound of his distress.

“Oh, bother, and now he’s fighting me,” it drawled, Mark struggling in its iron grip. “Your friend wants back out, I suppose. Well, he won’t be able to do that for much longer, thank goodness. So bothersome when they resist. Until we meet again,” it said, looking disdainfully at Mark’s fruitless attempts to free himself. He glowered defiantly back, tears of rage and pain burning in his eyes. The creature smirked at Amy, who was frozen in shock and fright, her eyes as big as marbles and mouth hanging slightly open. “Ya look like a fish, darling. His memories of you were delectable, though. Please keep making more for me. Ta-ta!”

Ethan screamed, releasing Mark’s arm and flailing wildly. She flinched like a scared rabbit, slamming herself against the steering wheel to get as far away from him as possible. Mark slid limply off the seat and on to the floor, nursing his wrist and crying quietly as Ethan convulsed. 

Then, as swiftly as the storm had descended, it was gone. His raw, wild shouts died; his body went slack on the seat; his eyes closed. He resumed his gentle snoring as if nothing had happened. 

The car was still for a long time, Amy quivering in shock and Mark simply unable to process what had just happened. Ethan just lay there, sleeping peacefully. 

Mark was almost never truly terrified. Video games scared him, sure, but this was a new level of fear, deep and instinctual and paralyzing. He was petrified. He had just witnessed a demon possess one of his closest friends, and he hadn’t been able to do _anything._ He had been _useless_ against whatever it was. He hated feeling helpless. He needed to find a way to fix this. Immediately. He would never forgive himself if he didn’t do everything in his power to save his best friend. His thoughts ran helter-skelter in a vicious cycle that always circled back to the painful fact that he must be able to help Ethan, even though he knew in the back of his mind the situation was outside of what he could control. That quiet little thought, the admission that things were more than he could handle, scared him far more than telling himself he was to blame for his friend’s pain. 

After what seemed like an eternity, Mark was brought back from his reverie by a gentle tap on his shoulder from Amy. He stared at her, his eyes long since dry but still glazed over. Her own eyes still held the last dregs of her terror, but she had collected herself. 

“Mark, please, please move,” she begged, “We need to wake him up. We have to see if he’s okay.”

His eyes focused and he roused himself from his spot on the car floor at last. He shakily climbed back onto the seat, hesitantly resting a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. 

“Please wake up,” he quaveringly pleaded, “Please be okay after that.”  
He stirred, groggily raising his head. Mark shrunk back as his arm came towards him, but he only yawned and stretched, his eyes fluttering open. He looked around in confusion. 

“Mark? Are we at your house yet? Why are we stopped?” he rapidly asked. Mark couldn’t say anything; he only yanked him into a tight hug. Ethan was more confused than ever. “What’s wrong? You’re acting like I died or something,” he quipped. Mark’s only answer was to tighten his embrace. “Seriously, what’s going on?” He noticed Amy eyeing him warily. “Are you going to introduce me to your friend, or have you two just been watching me sleep?” 

“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked bluntly, finally letting go.

“Getting in the car to go to your house. I was just asleep, what’s the matter?”

He took a deep breath, realizing that Ethan didn’t remember his _own amnesia._ The couple carefully explained everything that had happened during the past thirty-six hours; Ethan was skeptical at first, but the fingerprint-shaped red marks the monster had left on Mark’s wrist soon convinced him it was no joke. By the time they had finished, he was pale and shaking again. 

“So I have an angry spirit living inside me because I somehow disturbed it?” he whispered. “And it hurt you?” Mark nodded, not meeting his eyes. “What if it comes back? How do we stop it?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed quietly.

“Oh,” he said in a very small voice. He swallowed nervously. “What does it even want with me?”

“You said you couldn’t remember me at all when you woke up, right?” Amy interjected. He nodded. “Well, that thing said your memories of me were delectable. I think that it’s _eating_ your memories.”

Mark jumped with realization. “Do you have a dog?” he abruptly asked. 

“No, I’ve never had a- wait, do I have a dog?”

“Yes, his name is Spencer,” she said. 

“I forgot my own dog.”

“The thing said it liked dog memories,” Mark offered. “I think it ate yours.”

“So are they just gone now?” he asked worriedly.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope not.”

┈┈┈┈┈

The silence as they rode back to Mark’s house was a hundred times tenser than it had been before, but the rest of the drive was thankfully uneventful. When they arrived home, he could hear Chica barking as they got out of the car. Ethan lit up.

“Oh, you got a dog!” he said excitedly, but then his face fell. “Oh. I already knew that, didn’t I?”

Mark rested a hand on his shoulder as he unlocked the front door. “Yeah, but that’s okay. We _are_ going to fix this.” He said determinedly, mostly trying to convince himself. When he opened the door, Chica bounded out in an explosion of golden fur and nearly bowled him over. After giving him a big, slobbery kiss, she started running in excited circles around the group. Ethan laughed out loud at her antics and wished fervently that he could remember other times she’d done the same thing. He was still giggling when they walked inside, Chica disappearing around the corner as she eagerly ran ahead of them. He wheezed a little, trying to stop the giggles, but as he gathered himself his gasp was accompanied by little puffs of scarlet smoke. He instantly clapped a hand over his mouth. 

“Mark…” he apprehensively said, voice muffled. His friend turned to see what was wrong, his eyes widening as he caught sight of the crimson vapor now leaking from his nose in billowing curls. 

“Oh, crap,” he gulped, “the demon’s back!”

Amy, realizing what was going to happen an instant before it did, ran forward and caught him as his legs gave out. He was thankfully still conscious, though he was almost hyperventilating with panic as he leaned on her and struggled to stand. Mark rushed over to help, and the two of them supported him as they half walked, half dragged him to the couch. Tears sprang to Ethan’s eyes. 

“I feel so… empty,” he choked out, the last wisp of smoke dissipating. “What on earth was that?”

“Some red smoke came out of your mouth while that thing was inside you before,” Mark told him. 

Amy mostly listened as he told the trembling man more details about the creature that had possessed him, occasionally adding her own thoughts. At some point during the discussion, Chica slunk back into the room, concerned by the shouting. The faithful pet both wanted to help them and wanted to avoid the conflict. She started running her hands absentmindedly through the dog’s fur to calm the concerned canine down. Ethan stared at the golden retriever in confusion. 

“Wait, when did you get a dog?” 

“You met her just a minute ago,” Amy said, realizing he must have forgotten her again. He sadly nodded in understanding. 

“Oh.”

“I know we just got here, but I think we should go back to Ethan’s house,” Mark eventually said after some discussion of what to do next. “Maybe we can figure out where the thing came from. You didn’t go anywhere besides my house and your place the past couple weeks, right?”

“I mean, the grocery store and your house,” Ethan replied. “But other than that, I don’t think I’ve gone anywhere.”

“Well I think we can rule out the grocery store,” Amy chuckled.  
“And Amy and I haven’t been affected,” he said, “So your house it is.”

┈┈┈┈┈

Arriving back at Ethan’s house was hard for all three of them. Ethan didn’t realize they were at his house until Mark parked the car on the street and pointed it out. He felt like crying again. He couldn’t recognize his own _home_ , the place he spent the majority of his time. It was even worse when they got inside. Spencer ran down the stairs to greet them, and Ethan’s last thread of optimism broke as Spencer’s claws clicked excitedly across the hardwood. His tears were not the racking sobs from before, but quiet little droplets born from despair. He hugged Spencer tightly and struggled to pull memories of soft fluff from the far reaches of his mind. Mark placed a hand on his shoulder, afraid to ask the question hanging in the air.

“I forgot I had a dog,” he whispered brokenly, struggling to keep his voice from cracking. “I feel like I’m falling apart inside.”

Amy knelt down and wrapped her arms around him. Mark couldn’t bring himself to do the same, too busy trying to force his own hot tears back. He had to stay strong for Ethan. He had already lost it once before, he wasn’t going to do it again. He couldn’t afford to let them see it was getting to him, too. He was the strong one, he had to be strong so they could find the solution as fast as possible, he would not cry. He wouldn’t. He was at war with himself, fighting against his own weakness. He would not let the tears win. Amy reached out and grabbed his hand, and he looked down to see her crying as well. 

She hated seeing Mark do this to himself. She knew he was trying to be the rock in the group, that he was denying himself the chance to be sad because he thought he had to handle it alone so they could push forward. So she pulled him down to join the hug, trying to tell him without words that it was okay to cry, that he could cry too, that they all were in pain and it was _okay._ Ethan turned around and all three of them sat hugging like the world would break if they didn’t, eyes shut tight, supporting each other and trying to forget their problems for only an instant. She felt Mark’s tears drip silently onto her shoulder, and found a little bit of solace in knowing that he had let down his wall. 

The moment broke with Ethan’s surprised laugh. She opened her eyes and saw Spencer licking his ear, trying in his own way to make him feel better. She giggled, and all at once the mood turned and they were all laughing and loving the togetherness of the moment, tears of pain turning to tears of joy as the little dog yipped enthusiastically and his owner kissed the top of his head. He dashed into the next room, barking at the back door to be let outside, and Ethan ran after him. She grinned. Mark kissed her cheek, whispering a quiet “Thank you” into her ear, and she felt suddenly that it would be all right, no matter what came next. She pressed a quick kiss to his lips and smiled at him, wiping the last evidence of his tears away. 

A loud thump echoed from the kitchen and they stood up, sharing looks of alarm and rushing in to see what had happened. Ethan was lying in a heap on the kitchen floor, Spencer jumping in concerned circles around him and yapping worriedly. They ran over, Mark turning him over onto his back and fanning away the red smoke expelled with his every exhale, holding his breath to ensure he wouldn’t inhale any of it. Ethan was dead to the world but breathing normally, not in panicked huffs like earlier. Amy knelt down and carefully lifted one eyelid. She pulled her hand away quickly. 

“His eyes are black again,” she told Mark.

“His eyes are black? But that only happened when-”

Ethan jerked up with a snarl, teeth viciously snapping shut inches from her face. She screamed and Mark scrambled back with a yell, and not-Ethan cackled, leaping to its feet with an unnatural, jolting jump. Its obsidian eyes were dancing with malicious mirth as it watched them edge backwards. 

“Told ya I’d be back,” he sniggered. “I just couldn’t resist scarin’ ya a little.”

Spencer, snarling ferociously, lunged forward and latched onto its pant leg, trying to shake it like a rat. The demon looked down at him in annoyance, completely unmoved. Amy darted forward and pulled him off, fearful he would get hurt, running over to Mark with the outraged canine snug in her arms. The creature giggled. 

“Ya really think I’d kick the scrawny thing? You sure don’t listen, I told ya I love dogs,” It licked its lips, and she shuddered. The creature leaned lazily against the counter, grinning like a Cheshire cat. “I was just wonderin’ if you’d figured out why I’m here yet. It gets soooo boring up in his head.”

The couple was silent. Only Spencer’s continued struggling betrayed the passing of time. The monster’s grin widened into a disconcerting leer. 

“Figures I would have to tell you myself. I would’ve thought it’d be rather obvious, though perhaps I overestimated you two. After all, wouldn’t either of you hate to have the roof ripped off your house? Though, maybe grave robbing would be a better analogy. Anyways, I’d have a peek outside if I were you.” The creature swept them an elegant bow and winked cheekily, then unleashed a horrible, primal scream and keeled over, red smoke billowing out of its mouth. Mark ran forward and just barely kept Ethan from cracking his head against the tile. Amy rushed to help, Spencer leaping from her arms and fleeing the room in fright. As she ran through the haze, she forgot to hold her breath and inhaled some of the red vapor still hanging in the air. 

The kitchen dropped away and she was looking up at a man she recognized as Ethan’s dad. There was a toy truck in her hands, which looked chubby and boyish, and the whole scene was bathed in colored light from a Christmas tree to her right. With a sharp gasp, she was thrown back to the present. Pinching her nose to avoid breathing more of the smoke, she knelt down by Mark, who was looking at her with concern. 

“Are you okay? You spaced out there for a second,” he asked.

She was still trying to process what she’d seen. “I think… I think I saw one of his memories when I breathed in the red smoke,” she told him. “I saw his dad, and I was really little… What if the smoke is the memories he’s losing?”

“Should we catch it then? Maybe if he breathes it back in, the memory will come back. So much has already gotten away…” The smoke was disappearing before their eyes. She grabbed a glass that had been sitting on the counter and trapped some of the smoke beneath it, casting about for anything she could use to catch more as Mark snagged some inside a tupperware. But as she trapped more under bowls pulled from the cupboard, he called to her and pointed to the clear glass on the counter. The smoke trapped under it was still fading, and as she watched, it faded to nothing and the air around them cleared completely. They sat down heavily on the tile by the unconscious man, and she leaned her head tiredly against her boyfriend, looking wearily down at Ethan’s now peaceful face. 

“So much for that,” she said, defeated. She brushed the hair out of the man’s eyes and slowly lifted one of his eyelids again. His hazel eyes were back to normal. “I hope he didn’t forget today.” She gave a dry chuckle. “I don’t want to explain it all again.”

Mark leaned his head on hers and took her hand gently. “You saw a memory from his childhood, right? Maybe all that smoke was his toddler years.”

“That would be awful. Not knowing where you grew up.” Her grip on his hand tensed. “What if he forgets his parents? What if we have to tell them that their son can’t remember them?”

“We’re not going to let that happen,” he said firmly. “As soon as he wakes up we’re going outside to see what on earth that creature was going on about, and then we’re going to fix this.”

“Here, let me help you get him to the couch,” she said, shifting herself so she could support his legs, Mark wrapping his arms around his torso. Midway through moving him, he started stirring, and they nearly dropped him as he started lashing out, protesting weakly. They quickly lowered him to the floor and she shook him gently. 

“Wake up, you’re safe, you’re home!”

His eyes burst open, flashing with the last traces of panic. His breathing was ragged and heavy. She pulled him into a hug and Mark wrapped his arms around them both, and after a few seconds they felt him hesitantly hug back. 

“I still remember you guys,” he said quietly, “I still remember that I forgot.”

“You didn’t forget,” she said soothingly. “Your memories were stolen, not forgotten. Don’t blame yourself for what that creature is doing to you.”

“How can I not blame myself?” he cried, pulling free of the hug. “It said that it was my fault this was happening. And now I’ve dragged the two of you into this.”

“Ethan,” Mark said staunchly, “this is _not_ your fault. There is no way you’d do this to yourself on purpose, and an accident means that it’s no one’s fault but the creature that decided he wanted some twisted sort of revenge for something you clearly didn’t mean to do.”

“And we don’t blame you at all for bringing us into this,” she added. “We’re your friends, practically family at this point. Do you think we’d rather just walk into your house one day and find you a complete amnesiac?”

“No,” he said almost inaudibly.

“So no more blaming yourself,” she said. “We’re going to find out how to help you. We still remember you, even if you don’t remember us.”

He nodded, a little of the fight coming back into his eyes. He leaned back on his hands and realized they all were sitting on the hardwood floor in a completely different spot than he remembered collapsing in. “Wait, what did I do while I was out? I didn’t hurt you guys, right?”

“No, you didn’t,” Amy said reassuringly. 

“But the creature did tell us to look outside to see what had ticked him off so royally,” Mark said. “He also said something about not liking having his roof torn off. You haven’t knocked down a shed or anything, have you?”

“I don’t remember having a shed,” Ethan said half-heartedly. “Though that doesn’t mean much, what with my head being all messed up.”

The trio trekked outside, Spencer reappearing from around the corner at the sound of the door opening to follow eagerly at their heels. He sniffed Ethan’s sneakers suspiciously for a moment, then bounded off to do his own thing. They searched all over the backyard, peeking cautiously into the chest of gardening implements and poking through the sparse shrubbery, but nothing seemed to have been recently disturbed. 

“Maybe the front?” Ethan suggested. Mark shrugged and opened the side gate, but was immediately blocked by the gnarled, twisted branches of the young orange tree. 

“Did you plant this recently?” Mark slowly asked, backing away gingerly as the branches curled towards them. 

The tree was terrifying to behold. The wood was dark and knotty, the leaves were a mottled mix of yellow and brown, and it was covered with small, shriveled black fruits that looked like two-hundred-year-old walnuts. Not to mention the fact it was reaching towards them like it was alive. 

“I must have,” he replied nervously, “if you guys don’t remember it either.”

Mark carefully stuck out a hand and gave the gate a little push, and it swung creakily closed on the now thrashing branches of the corrupt tree. “I think that’s the root of our problem,” he said shakily.

His girlfriend gave a nervous little laugh behind him. “You could say this _leaves_ us with no choice but to cut it down.”

Ethan giggled. “I _wood_ not have believed it if I didn’t see it.”

He chuckled, the amusement infectious. “It wasn’t on purpose!” He grinned mischievously. “I’d say this was a _fruitful_ endeavor, though.”

They laughed happily together, ignoring the slight shudders from the gate as the tree lashed against it. It felt nice to laugh with carefree abandon, even if the last time they did it an evil entity had possessed one of them directly afterwards. 

“I think,” Mark said in between giggles, “that we need to do some more research. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier.”

“Yeah,” Ethan chuckled, gathering himself with some difficulty. “Do you think the tree is the problem, or where I planted it?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say it's because you dug a giant hole for it in the last couple of weeks,” Amy proposed. “The thing said it had its roof ripped off, which could have been you digging it up. You know all those horror stories of people disturbing the resting places of spirits and getting haunted?”

“So is it a ghost?” Mark wondered. “It didn’t seem like a person when it possessed you. It didn’t move or react like a person, and it didn’t have a name.”

“Probably some other sort of spirit, then. I really hope I don’t literally have a demon inside me.”


	3. Chapter 3

They decided to spend the rest of the day on research, trying to dig up any reports of supernatural activity in the area. Ethan worked on his monitors upstairs, Mark called dibs on the laptop downstairs, and Amy drifted back and forth between the two of them, offering input where she could and sifting through ridiculous cryptid newsletters on her phone since there wasn’t another computer she could use. 

After an hour, the articles had turned up nothing, and she gave up trying to make herself feel more useful and wandered back outside to see what could be done about the tree. It might be as simple as cutting it down, she mused. She was standing just outside of the tree’s reach, studying it. She noticed that the black fruits seemed to have grown larger since they were last outside just an hour ago. Curious, she ran back inside and grabbed a large pair of tongs with a thick wooden handle. Inching carefully closer to the tree, she reached out as far as she could and tried to snag one of the fruits. After a few tries, she got one, but before she could pull it back in a twig wrapped itself around the tongs and tried to reel her in instead. She played tug-of-war with the tree for a full minute before managing to snap the surprisingly strong offshoot. 

Holding it at arm's length and still using the tongs, she gingerly carried the fruit back into the kitchen. She plopped it down onto a plate, arming herself with a pair of rubber kitchen gloves and a chef’s knife, then carefully took hold of the fruit and started to slice it open.

┈┈┈┈┈

Ethan was waist deep in a report about Native American burial grounds in the LA area when he heard her scream echo from the kitchen. He sprinted down the stairs two at a time, almost colliding with Mark on the landing as he ran in from the living room. He skidded around the corner into the kitchen just in time to see her slam a heavy wooden cutting board down onto a writhing mess of scarlet tentacles on a plate. The glass plate shattered under the impact, but the sound was muffled in his ears, and his vision was getting fuzzy for some reason. Mark pushed past him, running forward to see if she was all right, and he fell heavily against the doorframe, clutching his head. He was vaguely aware of his best friend comforting Amy, but he wasn't really processing what was going on. His vision was filled with a crimson haze and darkening in his peripherals, and his muddled brain fired a weak warning signal, but he couldn’t seem to do much besides register a vague threat. It was difficult to piece coherent thoughts together. He saw his friends running towards him, yelling something, and then his vision went black.

When he came to, everything ached and his head was pounding. He groaned and opened his eyes, greeted by a very scared Mark hovering over him. He looked to his left and saw Amy curled on the floor, clutching her right arm and gritting her teeth in pain. 

“What happened?” he mumbled. “Argh, my head hurts.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s my fault,” he stammered, looking terrified. “I had to, you were…” He made a choking noise. “ _It_ was hitting her.”

“I- what?” He pushed himself up. “Are you okay? What did I do? I just remember standing in the doorway and then it was fading and I-.” He buried his head in his hands. “I hurt you…”

Mark grabbed him and wrapped him in an almost crushing hug. “No you didn’t, it was that _thing,_ it’s my fault, I should’ve gotten there faster, found a better way, I hurt _you_ -”

“Stop it!” 

Amy’s shout shocked them both into silence, still holding each other. She sat up, revealing the long red welts on her arm and the drying tear stains on her face, and he collapsed into sobs again. She crawled over to the two of them and all three hugged, but he pushed out of the embrace. 

“I shouldn’t be with you guys, you should go, I h-hurt you-”

“No.” she said forcefully. “It is _not your fault,_ ” She turned to Mark. “And you. You were protecting me, and Ethan, and hitting that monster on the head did that. Now both of you get in here or I’m never letting you out of this hug.”

It felt grounding and safe to be held by another person, and it was warm and comfortable inside the group hug. None of them wanted to be the first to let go. 

After eyes had been dried and ice packs had been distributed to those who wanted them, they filled each other in on what each person had missed. She told them about cutting the fruit open and its sprouting tentacles, and the couple told Ethan what happened when he blacked out. 

His eyes had turned black as the demon emerged, and it had pushed through the two of them and ran to the shattered plate, knocking Amy to the floor. It cradled the now unmoving mass of tentacles in its hands like it was its child. The monster then dropped it, grabbed the tongs that were still on the counter, and cracked Amy with them three or four times as she blocked her face with her arm and kicked at its legs, trying to sweep its feet out from under it. It had taken a swing at Mark as well, but Mark had grabbed the cutting board and thunked the creature on the head with it, and it dropped like a stone. Ethan was slightly relieved, and he tried to thank Mark for stopping him, but he wouldn’t let him, still feeling guilty about the small knot on his friend’s head. 

They were reluctant to retreat back to separate corners of the house, so they stayed in the kitchen and compiled their research so far, trying to pull some useful information from it. All three agreed that digging a hole to plant the orange tree is what made the entity mad, and that it was probably not a good idea to chop it down now, since the creature had apparently adopted it like a child. Ethan shared what he’d found about Native American tribes in the area, though it didn’t seem like his house was located on any sort of important tribal site. Amy’s findings were sitting in a pulpy heap in the trash can. 

It was Mark who really hit the jackpot. He’d found an article about a guy that lived in the area in 1976 and had been arrested for drug dealing. The police officers who searched his house reported finding the floor covered with pentagrams, lit candles, and books of summoning rituals. The man had gotten out of jail time on an insanity plea, as he wouldn’t stop rambling about demons while in court. There wasn’t an exact address, but it did describe the layout of the house in great detail and it matched his friend’s house exactly

“This house is pretty old, right?” he said. “I figured he might have lived here.”

“There’s certainly a good chance,” he replied. “It’d be foolish not to check it out.”

“What else is online about it?” asked Amy. 

“Not much, unfortunately. We could go down to the courthouse and check out the court records for October of that year, though,” he suggested. 

“Sounds like a good place to start,” Ethan responded. “At least we have one lead. I don’t think we can go today, though. It’s getting kind of late, and I haven’t eaten since lunch.”

“Demonic possession doesn’t stunt the appetite, then?” Amy joked.

“Guess not,” He smiled. “Let’s go jog my memory on the contents of my fridge.”

“I’m going to shoot Kathryn a text to please feed Chica real quick, I’ll be right there,” Mark said. “Where’s Spencer’s food?”

“I don’t know,” Ethan answered good-naturedly, already rummaging through the fridge. “Try the pantry.”

“Nevermind, I found it,” he said, rooting through the cupboard under the sink. “I’m going to get someone to upload my videos for the next couple of days so we can concentrate on this. Thank goodness I’ve got a buffer. Can you get off work, Amy?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a couple sick days saved up. Just let me call my boss.”

Dinner was followed by an argument over who would take the bed since Ethan didn’t have a guest room, which Mark and Amy finally won with the assertion that he now had significantly less memories of sleeping in his bed and clearly needed the chance to make some new ones. He maintained an exaggerated pout the entire time they were debating, only breaking it to admit sheepishly that he couldn’t remember where he kept the extra blankets. The two of them shooed him upstairs anyways, saying they were completely capable of finding the closet he kept them in themselves. Before he left, however, he wrapped them both in one last tight hug.

“Thank you,” he said, his earlier sadness showing a little in his tone. “Thank you for being here and helping and staying even when that thing attacked you. Just- thank you.”

“We would never leave you, Ethan,” Mark said, his throat tightening slightly.

“We love you. You really are family,” Amy added. She squeezed him reassuringly. “Now go get some sleep.”

“I love you guys too. Good night.”

┈┈┈┈┈

Mark was dozing fitfully on the couch, still too wound up and anxious to fall all the way asleep. The spring stabbing into his side wasn’t helping matters either. He was still glad he had made Ethan take the bed; he needed the sleep more than either of them did. He glanced over at Amy, fast asleep in the armchair in the corner. He envied her ability to fall asleep seemingly anywhere. He once saw her fall asleep while waiting for water to boil. He’d taken a picture of her; she was leaning back against the counter, head lolled back and mouth slightly open. It had been his lockscreen for two months before she finally made him change it. He, however, had trouble falling asleep anywhere but his bed, and whenever he managed to sleep in an unfamiliar place she would sarcastically congratulate him in the morning and gloat. He groaned and checked his watch; it was 2:37 in the morning. He was going to be absolutely exhausted tomorrow if he didn’t fall asleep soon.

He flopped onto his back and stared at the ceiling. The house was almost perfectly quiet, the soft ticking of the clock hanging in the kitchen now the loudest thing in the house. The old floorboards above him were creaking slightly, the noises of the night building up an atmosphere that he didn’t quite have a name for. He wasn’t sure he liked it. It was too peaceful to be real after everything that had happened that day. His paranoid brain kept telling him he was missing a piece of the puzzle, something that they overlooked that they needed to be watching for. He turned back onto his side, shrugging off the suspense like a dirty blanket as he tried unsuccessfully to get comfortable on the ancient couch that seemed determined to impale him. It was probably nothing, he rationalized. Just him being overly suspicious. He sighed and closed his eyes, praying sleep would find him.

A savage scream shattered the silence, tearing through Mark like a wild animal, and it only took Mark one horrified instant to see what he’d missed.

_Oh, crap, the nightmares!_ he thought. _He said he had nightmares!_  
He all but tumbled off the couch and flew up the stairs, bursting into Ethan’s bedroom. He broke into a coughing fit almost immediately. The air was thick with red smoke, and with every breath a memory flashed before his eyes. His heart broke when he realized he was watching Ethan’s memories of making videos. There was Until Dawn, Cuphead, Clue, Superhot, even Bloons Tower Defense, nearly five years of work disappearing in mere moments as the smoke poured out of his mouth. Mark dropped to his knees, fighting to get his breath back and stop the tide of memories threatening to overwhelm him. The haze was less dense near the ground, so he just laid flat, gasping for air, his vision flickering back and forth between the present and the past. He regained his breath after a few seconds and pushed himself up onto his elbows, only to inhale another lungful of scarlet vapor.

He was thrown into a particularly vivid memory, and he was staring at Ethan’s reflection in his monitor as his subscriber count ticked past one million. Greif washed over him. He could feel his friend’s elation from reaching that milestone, from having built a channel from the ground up that now more than a million people all over the world watched, so powerful and hopeful for the future that he couldn’t stand it, it was too much, Ethan was _losing_ this, he was watching Ethan’s memory and pride in what he had accomplished evaporate like puddles in the face of noon sunshine. He was hurled back to the present and now he could hear Ethan wailing, a horrible heartbroken sound like his soul was being ripped out of him. He was thrashing in the bed like he wanted to strangle the bedsheets, twisting them into impossible knots around his tightly clenched fists. 

Mark took a deep breath and plugged his nose, running to the bed and desperately throwing himself onto it, bear-hugging the still-sleeping body and trying to calm his flailing limbs. Ethan lashed out at him, one hand catching him across the face and knocking his hand away from his nose. He just wrapped both arms around him as tight as he could, giving up on covering his nose and crying out as the memories started to fly past. Ethan’s struggling started to slow, his screams quieting to whimpers as the air started to clear around them. Smoke was no longer spilling from his mouth. Mark could feel him quivering in his arms, and he couldn’t stop the heaving sobs that tore out of him. He laid there the rest of the night, wide awake and mourning the brilliance that had just been lost, with his best friend shaking and crying like a wounded animal in his arms, still fast asleep.

┈┈┈┈┈

When Amy ran in the next morning, calling for them with terror in her voice, he could only stare at her, shellshocked and red-eyed, Ethan now sleeping quietly but still trembling slightly.

“What happened?” she questioned. “I woke up this morning and you were gone. My goodness, Mark, did you sleep at all? Why are you two shivering? Is he still asleep and shaking like that?”

He could only muster up the energy for one word answers. “Nightmare.”

“Yours or his?”

“His.”

“Did you sleep?”

“No.”

“Did Ethan wake up at all?”

“No.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. He haltingly disentangled himself from Ethan and sat up next her, leaning his head on her shoulder. Tears started to fall again, but he made no effort to stop them. He was too exhausted, physically and mentally. She rubbed his back, and he related the events of the previous night in a dead, monotone voice. Her tears were mingling with his own by the time he finished.

“I don’t think he remembers his channel anymore,” he said. “He loved making videos. He loved his audience. He just lost that, maybe forever.”

“Mark, you have to keep hoping. We’re so close to finding out why this is happening. And that’s halfway to fixing it.”

“He’s one of my closest friends. I’ve known him for five years. It hurts so much.”

“I think you should go back to our house and sleep for a while. Ethan and I will go to the courthouse and find those records, and you will go home and rest until you feel better.”

“What if he has another attack?” 

“Then I’ve watched a lot of Karate Kid.”

He gave a weak chuckle, too tired to offer much resistance. “All right. But please be careful. Both of you.”

She kissed him, and he could taste the salt on both of their lips. 

“We will. Now let’s wake him up.”

“Hang on, let me go first. I don’t want him to see how upset I am.”

“Mark, we can’t hide what happened last night.”

“But he’ll feel so guilty. You saw how he was after the demon hurt you yesterday.”

“I’m not hiding it. You can tell him or I will.”

He heaved a shuddering sigh, knowing that she was right. “Okay. Let me just go splash some water on my face first.”

Explaining the previous night to Ethan was just as painful as Mark thought it would be. He let Amy do most of the talking, correcting her when needed. He got paler and paler as they told him about the memories he was now missing, but there were no more tears, just a hard, cold determination. 

“Well that means I have even more reason to find a solution to this,” he said bravely. “I really had a million subscribers?”

“Yeah.” He smiled fondly, staring off into space. He was barely awake at this point, his fatigue hitting full force now that he wasn’t wound up more tightly than a spring. Amy looked down at Mark’s head on her shoulder with a touch of concern.

“Okay, we’re getting you home.” she said. He grinned lazily.

“I feel like I have an adrenaline hangover,” he mumbled.

“I thought you couldn’t drink.”

“Yeah, but I have before,” he said. “Wait, you still remember that I don’t drink!”

“Oh!” Ethan smiled in happy surprise. “I guess I do. It’s funny, I think I still remember quite a lot about you. I’m glad I still have clear memories of someone.”

“Shh, don’t jinx it.” He gave a tired half-smile. 

They decided to just drive Mark back to his own house so he could take care of Chica and sleep in his own bed. After wrestling Spencer into his carrier so he wouldn’t be left alone, they piled back into the car and left. Ethan was on high alert the entire drive; none of them were eager for a repeat of yesterday’s drama on the highway. 

Mark stumbled upstairs and fell into his bed as soon as they got home, asleep almost instantly. Ethan guiltily watched his exhausted friend stagger off. 

“I feel awful that I kept him up all night.”

“Well, thanks for not going full ‘demonic possession’ on him,” Amy called over her shoulder, opening the back door to let the two dogs into the yard. He laughed nervously.

“Yeah, I guess it could have been worse, huh?”

“Please don’t beat yourself up over it. Mark did enough of that this morning for the both of you. You were asleep, you couldn’t help it.”

“I’ll do my best. Also, one thing before we go.”

“Hmm?”

“If I start to have an attack again, I don’t want you to hold back. I’d never forgive myself if I seriously hurt either of you.”

“I’ll only promise that if you promise to stop being so self-sacrificing.”

“Fair enough.”

“Then I promise. Now let's get going.”


	4. Chapter 4

The archives under the courthouse were not designed to be pleasant. Ethan looked down the long dark aisles with more than a little trepidation. The space was cramped and dingy, the lights kept low to preserve the fragile paper records, which were stored in towering file cabinets with faded labels designating the year they were from. He was pretty sure some of them dated back to the 1800’s. Why they hadn’t been digitized, he had no idea. The densely packed containers formed corridors that twisted and turned with no apparent organization, though the secretary had told them it was roughly chronological. The farther from the door they walked, the older things would be. He was glad the records they were looking for were from the 1970’s, which hopefully shouldn’t be too far from the front. He was nervous about plumbing the depths of this shadowy maze. Amy walked resolutely past him, choosing a drawer at random and starting to check dates. 

“This is all from the last year or so. We’re going to be quite a bit farther back.”

“Let’s get started then,” Ethan said resignedly.

“Should we split up?”

“Nah, I have zero sense of direction. I’m not sure I would be able to get out of here on my own.”

“Maybe we should have brought some bread crumbs to leave a trail.”

“Or some safety flares so search and rescue can find us.”

They traipsed down the claustrophobic passages, periodically checking the labels as they went. It got even darker as they lost sight of the light from the entrance, eventually prompting Amy to pull out her phone and turn on the flashlight. He felt around in his pockets for his own phone, but she reminded him that his had broken a couple days ago. 

“Who would have thought all of this was under the courthouse,” he said, amazed at the sheer volume of the space they were walking through. 

“I wish they’d made lighting a bigger priority. It’s hard to see much of anything. How can they stand working down here?”

“I don’t think anyone comes down here much. There’s dust all over almost everything.”

“You think they’d at least send a custodian down every once in a while. Hold on, what was that date?” She paused in front of the cabinet to their left. “May 1979.”

“We’re close. Just a little farther…”

He strode to a cabinet seven or eight away from them. “Can I see the light?” he called.

“Here.” She handed him the phone. 

“1977. Not quite.” They followed the line of containers until they found 1976. 

“October, October… Here it is,” Amy muttered, combing through the drawers. She handed a sheaf of papers to him, keeping half for herself and sitting cross-legged down on the cold concrete. “Start looking through these.” She took the phone and balanced it on the edge of the drawer so it shone down on them. He sat down next to her, coughing a little at the dust they stirred up. 

The majority of the papers were case files, so for the most part all they had to do was look at the list of charges and put it aside. Occasionally one of them would find a case that looked promising, but it never seemed to be the one they were looking for. He wished the article Mark had found had given a name or a more exact date. Who knew there were this many cases tried in one month in LA? 

After about a quarter of an hour of searching, during which they’d gone through about two dawers of manila folders and yellowing paper, Ethan tossed his most recent file to the side and groaned. He had a small headache coming on. Amy punched his arm lightly.

“Come on, we can’t give up yet! There’s only one drawer left.”

“I didn’t think this many petty crimes could be committed in an entire year, let alone a month. And my head hurts.” He rubbed his eyes, which were dry from peering at tiny, compact lines of text. His headache seemed to be worsening, which was annoying. He thought that it would start to fade now that he’d stopped staring at papers. “Have you had any luck?”

“Not with this stack. I’m just about finished with it.”

“I’m only going to do one more pile. I don’t think I can handle any more than that.” He got up and opened the final drawer marked with “October 1976.” He moved to grab the first chunk, then paused. What if this guy had actually been tried on _Halloween?_ This whole affair was cursed, so might as well pick the spookiest date on the calendar. He grabbed the very last file crammed into the back of the drawer and plunked himself back down. The first thing he saw in the folder was a grainy photograph of a pentagram hand-painted on a dark wood floor. “I think I found it,” he sighed. She looked at the file over his shoulder. 

“Of _course_ it was Halloween,” she grumbled.

He heaved a giant sigh and blew a considerable cloud of crimson smoke into the air. He looked at Amy, alarm and fear evident in his eyes. A smoky cough rasped out of him as his mind raced. He had to get away from her. The last time the creature had seen her, it had tried to brain her with his kitchen’s equivalent of a baseball bat. 

He leapt to his feet and sprinted away down the aisle, ignoring her cries for him to stop and the tickling in his throat and lungs telling him running was not a good idea. He came to an intersection and chose a path at random, praying the endless maze of filing cabinets would help him lose her. He managed to keep running for a good five minutes before gasping to a halt somewhere around 1880. He fell to his knees, each wheeze punctuated by a puff of red smoke. His head was screaming in pain and his vision was starting to fade to black. He collapsed in a swirl of dust and everything went dark.

┈┈┈┈┈

Amy wasn’t sure if she was more angry or worried about Ethan at this point. She had been wandering around for at least a half hour, calling his name every minute or so and clutching the precious case file to her chest nervously. Her phone’s battery was trickling lower and lower, dropping into the thirty percent range, but there was no way she could find him in the dark if she turned it off.

She walked down countless corridors, peeking her head around corners cautiously and keeping her ears carefully attuned to any sound that might signal he was nearby. She had given up on him answering her some time ago and now searched silently except for the echo of her footsteps, unsure if he was still possessed or not. The demon had never controlled him for longer than a few minutes before, but she didn’t discount the possibility. She was getting more and more worried with every minute that passed. As she rounded the next corner, though, Ethan barrelled into her, slamming the breath out of her body and knocking her to the floor. The phone light flickered out when it hit the concrete, plunging them both into darkness.

“What on earth? Why would you-”

“Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you coming, but we gotta go, now!”

“What! Why?” she exclaimed, but he was already scooping up her phone and grabbing her wrist, pulling her off into the dark. It was all she could do to sprint after him without tripping over her own feet. She had no idea how they hadn’t run headfirst into anything, but he seemed to know where he was going, making turn after turn and muttering directions under his breath. They ran through the dark for a long time, but eventually her eyes caught the faint light of the entrance ahead. She shook off his hand and tumbled out the door, glorying in the flourescent lights of the hallway. She closed her eyes and slid to the floor, trying to calm her wildly beating heart. Thankfully she had kept ahold of the manila file with the case information during their flight. 

“Are you going to tell me why we were running now?” she asked, but he was still silently standing in the shadows just beyond the door to the archives. She suddenly became aware that he wasn’t even breathing hard. A chill ran down her spine. Something was very wrong. 

“You never would have found your way out of there if it weren’t for me. Ya would have wasted away in the dark, lost and scared. Unable to find a conclusion to the endless rows of history stretching before you, desperately searching for the exit, confined to the blackness for eternity. All batteries die, and all humans have a breaking point. I think you would have gone positively, delightfully, batty. ” He stepped out of the shadows. “Too bad I enjoy this drama far too much to let it end, that would have been lovely to see.”

She gasped and jumped back up, gaze caught on his eyes. No, not his, _it’s_ eyes. They were full of dark eddies that made them look deeper than the ocean, made even more terrifying by the ominous backdrop of the dark shelves behind them. Her instincts were yelling at her furiously that she needed to run, to get away, that this was a threat, but her legs screamed that they couldn’t go any further and her brain insisted that she couldn’t abandon Ethan, even when he was like this. She remained frozen in the hallway. It gave a dark, haunting chuckle and blew a scarlet smoke ring into her face. 

“I picked a name, deary. Blank. I’d been thinking about it since your insolent boyfriend asked me about it, and I rather like the sound of this one. Simple, easy to _remember,_ ” it laughed meanly, “and rather fitting, considering what I’m doing to your friend, hmm? And of course, all of his adoring fans wanted so desperately for me to be real.”

Something in her broke. She lunged forwards, aiming to ram right into its stomach. It sidestepped her easily, pushing her to the floor as she charged past. The air whooshed out of her lungs as it planted a foot firmly on her back. 

“I could have him forget _everything,_ you know,” it hissed in her ear. “He would be an infant. Knowing nothing about the world or even how to talk.” Her breath caught in her throat. “It would be so _easy,_ ” he crooned. “Just a little extra legwork, break down a few mental walls. I could leave him _mad._ ” It giggled crazily. Abruptly the weight on her back vanished, and she scrambled away from the cackling demon. 

“All I really want is the memories, though. All of his delicious, emotion-riddled memories. And I’ve saved the best for last.”

“W-what do you mean?”

“He doesn’t have much left at this point. There’s a certain batch of memories I’ve left alone thus far.” Blank licked its lips and grinned. “After all, I simply had to savor watching a man forget his own best friend.” He covered the space between them in a single inhuman leap, leaning in very close to her. Those black whirlpools were only inches from her own terrified brown eyes. Her mouth got very dry. “It’s going to be _beautiful._ ” It leaned back and tapped her nose with a chuckle. “And it’s coming soon. Better hurry back.”

Ethan sagged against her, and she wrapped her arms against him, trying to keep them both from sliding to the floor. There was no screaming this time, only a trickle of crimson smoke and a dead silence that was somehow much worse.

┈┈┈┈┈

When he woke up, she had already taken pictures of the entire file (her phone thankfully still worked, though the screen was cracked) and was anxious to go. She had simply left the file laying inside the door to the archives, too nervous to venture back in and re-shelve it. She rushed them both out to the car, ignoring Ethan’s frantic questions and the confused glances of the secretary as they ran past. Only after they’d gotten back on the road did she give him a scattered account of what had happened. However, she left out how the creature had pushed her down, and how it threatened to drive him mad. When he heard how his memories of Mark could be the next to go, tears sprang to his eyes and it was all he could do to hold back the rising sobs.

“It’s true,” he choked out. “About my m-memory. I think Mark’s all I have left. I can’t… I don’t… I don’t want to forget.”

She was blinking tears from her own eyes. “You won’t,” she said desperately. “We are going to fix this before that happens.”

“But what then? What about after? Will I get my old memories back? What if I’m just stuck with almost total amnesia my entire life?”

“Then… then we make new memories,” she said softly. “We stay by you and we fill you up with new memories.”

“It won’t be the same.”

“No. But we’re going to do our best to make it pretty darn close.”

He was silent for a while. At last he turned and gave her an awkward one-armed hug from the passenger’s seat. “Thank you.”

┈┈┈┈┈

Mark was still asleep when they got home. Ethan got the phone and desktop synced so they could see the photos in more detail, and Amy ran upstairs to wake her boyfriend up. She filled him in on everything that had happened at the library, again leaving out her injury. He was already stressed enough from hearing the story of the most recent possession. He didn’t need one more thing to worry about, and she knew he’d blame himself for not being there to protect her. He was wide awake even though he’d only gotten about two hours of sleep, and she suspected he was getting a second-hand adrenaline spike from her account.

The case file was fairly large, so there was a lot of information to poke through. The house in the case was indeed Ethan’s; at least one mystery had been solved. The street name hadn’t even changed. Someone during the course of the court proceedings had photographed some of the books found in the house when the man was arrested, so they decided to look through those first. If this man really had summoned a demon, the books would surely have the way to get rid of said demon. The trio pored over the grainy, thirty year-old photos, trying to glean as much information as they could. The books appeared to be hand-written and were full of carefully drawn diagrams, though the writing on about half of the pages was smudged to the point where it was illegible. What they could read was disturbing, to say the least. The pages mostly contained graphically detailed instructions for curses and their bizarre effects on people and objects, with the occasional potion recipe. It was like someone had crossed a chemistry textbook with a witch’s grimoire. They quickly found the pages on demon summoning, but they couldn't find anything on how to banish one. 

“Well, it looks like we really are dealing with an honest-to-goodness demon,” Mark groaned, leaning back in his chair. “And this guy was apparently so dim-witted that he didn’t even find a way to get rid of it before he summoned it. According to this, he tried to bury it in the garden and expected it to go away.”

“There’s a note on the bottom of this page that says if additional help is needed we should go to a medium,” Amy pointed out.

“Mediums aren’t real.”

“Well neither are demons.”

“Point taken. But how are we going to find a real medium? I’m pretty sure most of the ones around here are just crooks.”

“Probably just trial and error,” Ethan interjected. “There’s not much else we can do.”

“What if none of them are real?”

“Then we’re back to square one. We at least have to try. We don’t have any other leads, and the rest of these pages don’t seem to have anything useful.”

Mark conceded the point, and they set about compiling a list of all the psychics and mediums they could find online within a drivable distance. There was an absurdly large amount, advertising themselves as everything from faith healers to exorcists to clairvoyants. He sighed at the list of more than 20 names, knowing most if not all of them were probably scams. This was going to take a while. He made arrangements for the dogs to stay at Kathryn’s house, and then they were off. 

The first seven were a complete bust. It was blatantly obvious before they even made an appointment that they were nothing more than talk and tom-foolery, so they said polite goodbyes and hurried off to the next place. They actually booked a reading at number eight, which had seemed slightly more promising, but the medium herself did nothing but tell them vague nonsense. 

They continued going down the list after a brief lunch stop, but nine through sixteen were a similar waste of time. Mark was getting seriously worried. It was getting to be late in the evening, with all the driving they had done, and they were no closer to getting help. They arrived at number seventeen to see a large red “CLOSED” sign hanging from the door. The hours posted on the window said they wouldn’t open until 8 the next morning. They reluctantly turned around and headed for home, resolving to continue tomorrow. 

It was nearly eleven by the time they got home, and they were all emotionally drained and physically exhausted. Mark sincerely hoped they were doing the right thing by trying to find a medium. It just seemed so far-fetched that any of the people they had met that day could actually provide psychic help. At least a few probably needed psychiatric help. But they had to keep going. They had nothing else to go on. 

He pulled a granola bar out of the pantry, his stomach loudly reminding him that none of them had eaten since that afternoon. He grabbed a few more, tossing two each to Ethan and Amy, before plunking himself down on the couch. 

“It’s about all we’ve got at the moment, I’m afraid. Unless you want cornflakes.”

“No sweat. I’m too tired to care anyways.” Ethan said, walking over to join him. He tried to sit down next to him, but he missed the end of the couch and ended bruising his tailbone on the hardwood instead. After the ridiculous day they’d had, all he could do was laugh. It just seemed so trivial, and there was something singularly comical about falling on his butt doing something as simple as trying to sit down.

“Mark, tell me honestly. How often do I do that?”

Mark was trying and failing to stifle his own giggles. “Pretty often.” He stood up and performed a ridiculous parody of the moment, ending with a highly dramatized death that left him sprawled across Ethan’s crossed legs. He held it for as long as he could without laughing, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and eyes crossed, but neither could manage for more than thirty seconds before dissolving into boyish giggles. He shoved him unceremoniously off his lap and got up to sit down properly, but missed the couch again, his legs folding under him. He could hear Mark laughing again, sure it was his attempt to add another layer to the hilarity of the moment. He tried to stand again, but his legs didn’t seem to be working properly.

“I’m not joking anymore. I-I can’t get up!”

He stopped laughing immediately. “What?” 

He tried pulling himself up again, but his muscles weren’t cooperating. He leaned back on his hands, trembling, as Amy ran over from the kitchen. 

“M-my legs keep giving out.”

“Are you feeling okay otherwise?”

“My vision’s not fading like when it possessed me, and my head’s fine.”

“And no red- oh crap.” As he spoke, red vapor slowly started leaking from Ethan’s nose.

“No, no, no!” He was panicking. He had only one thing left for the monster to take, and it was the one thing he couldn’t stand losing right now. Mark realized it too, and he seized him in a tight hug. He was uncomfortably reminded of them in this same position just a day ago, hugging tightly on the ground, the GoPro forgotten on the table above them. He caught a whiff of the red smoke, and saw the two of them painting together. He started to tear up as more memories of the two of them started flashing past. Amy hovered behind them, torn between breaking this moment between best friends and her desire to help. She knew she was not who Ethan needed right now. 

“Focus on me. Please. Tell me what you remember about me.” A memory of a game night together swam in front of his eyes.

“I-I still remember the pies. My filling was apple. We loved playing video games together on the weekends when we weren’t filming.”

“What else?” He could see them goofing off while editing. 

“We took improv lessons together.”

“What else?” They were frosting cakes, cracking jokes and squabbling over decorating supplies.

“Your favorite color is red.”

“W-what else?” They were laughing together on the tour bus. The red smoke was coming faster, both of their voices becoming more desperate.

“I-I don’t know-”

“Think harder!” A shared charity livestream disappeared into thin air.

“I wrecked your van for a video.”

“Keep thinking!” A night of giggles and horror movies, fading to nothing.

“There isn’t any more, Mark! T-they’re going…”

“No, no, there must be something. I-I can’t lose this, you mean too much to me, dig deeper-”

“We met at a convention!” The memory glowed in his mind like a tiny star, fragile and faint, but Ethan dragged it into the light, tried desperately to hold it there, to capture the memory in a little glass jar because he knew that there weren’t any more, he couldn’t find more, they were all gone, oh please no, all gone… 

“Don’t let it die, Ethan!” Mark was crying into his shoulder. 

“I did a backflip for you…” He was blinded by his own tears. He had to keep talking or it would be torn away from him, the last scrap of an irreplaceable bond between them, Mark was his best friend, he couldn’t stand it, it was too much, he might break. “I came up to you at a convention, and I asked to do a backflip for you, and you were worried about me…”

“Please keep going…”

“I did a backflip at… at… I don’t know where we were!”

“Fight it, hold onto it! Please, no…”

“You were worried… I did a… I wanted to… Mark, it’s going…”

They clung to each other, and suddenly he could see it, that first memory of his spastic and excited friend, and he knew that he saw it because the other did not, because it had joined the haze of joyful moments surrounding them, floating gently away like wispy clouds in the face of a summer breeze. His heart shattered, a useless barrier against the tsunami of anguish that crashed over the both of them. 

Ethan felt empty. Horribly, awfully, dreadfully, empty. His core had been hacked out of him, his soul rent in two, and he could never be whole again. He clutched the man in front of him tightly, knowing that this person had gone through so much to help him, but he couldn’t even remember why. He didn’t know how they had built this connection. It crushed him. He knew he loved Mark like a brother, but everything was gone and the past was empty and things could never be right again. They sobbed together, mourning the memories glistening in the crimson fog surrounding them, mourning a friendship that now rested on one leg, mourning a broken promise that it would be all right. How could it be all right. He was like a ghost ship, left with only others’ memories of its past life and the knowledge of what was happening now. They were still together, but one of them was lost. Drifting. And it felt like no amount of searching could ever bring him back. He was utterly broken. When the silent darkness started encroaching on his vision, he welcomed it. 

Mark felt him drop his half of the hug and fall slack in his arms, but he wouldn’t let go. If he held on, he wouldn’t have to look at an Ethan who wouldn’t remember him, who knew nothing about his family, who was Ethan but missing the things that had made him into Ethan. So he hugged, eyes squeezed shut, and he cried. He was vaguely aware that Amy had left them alone, which he was grateful for. His friend stiffened in his embrace, but he was in no state to deal with a new trial. He knew that any more trauma might push him over the brink. He didn’t let go. 

“Oooh, that was _wonderful._ ” He still wouldn’t look up, scared of what he would see. “You, my friend, are a sentimental fool. He’s much better off without memories of an oaf like you. Now kindly get your mitts off me.” He didn’t move. His tears were slowing, freezing and hardening into anger. “I said, get off of me. I have no need for hugs.” Blank’s voice was full of disdain. But Mark wasn’t ready to let go. 

With a brutal, violent swing, it threw him across the room, breaking his grip easily. He crashed into the kitchen table, falling to the floor. He lay curled into the fetal position, pain searing through his ribs and fire raging in his heart. The shattered pieces made perfect kindling. 

He slowly got to his feet, glaring over at the creature that had taken over his best friend’s body. He couldn’t think, emotions roiling in his mind like a tempest. He stormed back over to the monster, unsure what he was planning on doing but knowing that he had to hurt the thing that had done this to them. The creature giggled madly. 

“You wouldn’t hurt your frie-”

Mark socked it squarely in the jaw. 

Caught completely by surprise, it stumbled backwards with an unearthly shriek.

“You _dare-_ ”

A thunk echoed through the room and it dropped flat. Amy stood shaking in the doorway, a wooden stool held at the ready in case it got back up. 

“I heard the crash, are you okay?”

“No.” he whispered. His anger flickered out as quickly as it had ignited, and the heartache came rushing back. “No, nothing is okay.”


	5. Chapter 5

Breakfast the next morning was a depressing affair. Over toast and cereal, Amy explained the previous night to Ethan, since he had only awoken long enough the night before to drowsily ask what was going on before falling asleep right on the living room floor. Mark mostly sat silent, only talking when she prompted him to. Ethan barely said two words throughout the whole meal. She found herself nervously chattering about nothing to fill the silence, but any attempt at conversation fell flat in the overwhelming atmosphere of bleakness and she stopped trying. It was like all the energy had drained out of the room. None of them could eat much. After 10 minutes of awkward picking at increasingly soggy cereal, she agitatedly pushed back her chair and started getting ready to leave, the other two following suit. She stopped them at the door.

“This is horrible. There is nothing I can say to that, and I don’t understand your pain because I was never as close as you two were, but I do know that this hurts. So much. So incredibly much because it feels like you’ve lost each other, but you’re both still here. But we still have to hope!” she pleaded. “The memories might not be gone. We can still win. If we stall out here, we’re stuck in the pain and we can never move past it to a better place. We have to keep going.”

“Okay,” Mark whispered. Ethan leaned a head on his shoulder, a few mute tears trailing down his cheeks. He nodded, but said nothing. 

“Then let’s go find a medium.”

┈┈┈┈┈

Their luck didn’t seem to have changed much from the previous day. Psychics seventeen through twenty-one were no better than the first sixteen. The more crooks and crack-pots they visited, the more demoralizing each failure became. The morning dragged on, and their list of addresses was dwindling. It felt like they’d driven across the entire state at this point. Address number twenty-two was a run-down little place in a not-so-great part of town, but the walls of the shop were painted a cheery yellow and the outward shabbiness seemed to drop away as they stepped inside. The lobby was decorated lavishly, like something out of Arabian Nights, and a sparkling hummingbird wind chime jangled as they entered, emerald wings catching the sunlight as it twirled and sending glimmering patterns flashing across the walls. Mark felt his spirits lift the tiniest bit at the sheer positivity radiating from this shop. A petite woman greeted them from behind a brilliantly patterned counter, dressed, surprisingly, in a no-nonsense, slate gray pantsuit, graying hair pulled back into a ballerina bun.

“Hello, and welcome to Stella’s. Will you be booking a reading or a seance?”

“Neither, actually,” he said. “We have a rather serious problem of the supernatural nature we were hoping you could help us with?”

“Well, I won’t be much help, but if you’d like an appointment with Ms. Stella I can certainly arrange it.”

“I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Let’s do it,” Ethan whispered to Mark. He had hardly uttered a word the whole day, but now he had a little color back in his cheeks and a sparkle in his eye. 

“Is she available right now?”

“I don’t think she has anyone at the moment. Hang on, be back in a jiffy.” She winked and disappeared through an arched doorway patterned with exotic, foreign symbols.

“This place feels… good,” he said. His friends nodded in agreement. The place absolutely reeked of happiness. It was unexplainable. Standing in this room made him feel like he’d just swallowed a warm marshmallow. “Maybe this one is it.”

The trio wandered through the eccentric little foyer, marveling at the bright colors and intricate patterns stenciled onto any surface flat enough to showcase them, from the overstuffed armchairs in one corner to the bookcases on the far wall. Mark was reminded of birds of paradise, each item of furniture jostling to be the brightest and the flashiest. 

“She’s ready for you! Just come on back,” the receptionist called from somewhere beyond the doorway. 

“Twenty-second time’s the charm,” he muttered as they entered the shadowy domain of Stella the self-proclaimed sorceress. 

Her lair was lit only by candlelight, and the walls and ceiling of the small room were draped elegantly with miles of gauzy purple cloth threaded with golden filigree, giving the impression of a much smaller space than was actually there. She was sitting cross legged on a low wooden stool in the center of a circle of six ornate armchairs, eyes shut tight and hands resting on her knees. Their first impression was of an exotic tropical frog, with thin bony arms and large gangly bare feet. She wore mustard colored robes patterned with forest green embroidery, a ludicrously large puke orange turban, enough necklaces to choke an elephant, and her fingers were almost completely covered with a mismatched assortment of gaudy rings. It was by far the most ridiculous get-up they’d seen on a supposed psychic thus far. Whether this added to her credibility or not, Mark was unsure. They hesitantly took their seats in the ring of chairs, afraid to disturb the silence that hung over the room. There was no sign of the friendly receptionist from earlier. 

“Two of you are in love,” the psychic boomed. They jumped, startled at the almost yelled pronouncement. “And one of you has a severe allergy.” The group was silent, unsure what she wanted them to say. She was right, and she was specific. That was better than anything they’d gotten before. “Well?” she squawked, her eyes shooting open to stare piercingly at them. “How’d I do?”

“Uh, good? Amy and I are dating, and Ethan’s allergic to peanuts.”

“Excellent. Now that I’ve calibrated to account for your auras, what is this pressing issue you wish to resolve?”

Mark had his short spiel refined and memorized after so many failed attempts. “Ethan disturbed a forty-year-old demon and now it’s living inside his head, eating his memories, and possessing him.”

“Well, isn’t that a conundrum.” She placed her hands on her hips and faced the subject of the statement, frowning so hard her eyebrows disappeared in the wrinkles on her forehead. Humming tunelessly, she went slightly cross-eyed and flared her nostrils, massaging her own forehead. After at least two minutes of this perplexing performance, she gasped loudly, her eyes snapping back into focus. “Your aura is badly disturbed, dear. Worst tangles I’ve seen in a very long time. If you give me a half-hour of intense meditation and some incense I can straighten it out for you.” 

Ethan was skeptical, to say the least. This sounded a lot like what most of the other psychics had told him. They all had their own word for it: aura, karma, essence, spirit, whatever; none of them actually did anything about the literal demon living inside him. Correct guesses about allergies or not, he didn’t want to waste a half-hour on rubbish promises.

“I think we can go,” he said, standing up and moving towards the door. He wasn’t about to sit through another useless and bad-smelling “session” if he could help it. As he reached for the doorknob, however, his vision started darkening. _Not now,_ he desperately thought. He might give this decrepit old shrew a heart attack. He hurriedly yelled out a warning as shadows started encroaching on his mind. “It’s happening again!”

Mark launched himself out of the armchair and caught him just as his knees buckled and he blacked out. The medium was stunned into silence as Amy carefully checked one eye. 

“Hazel, we’re good.” 

He sighed in relief, but as they carried him towards one of the chairs, his friend’s body stiffened in his arms. _Oh crap._

The demon cackled and gave him a swift uppercut, snapping his head back. Mark clutched his jaw and stumbled backwards, pain throbbing through his head and stars dancing in front of his eyes. 

“How d’ya like that, huh?” Blank crowed triumphantly, vaulting to its feet. “It doesn’t feel nice to get punched.” It charged towards him like a battering him, but Amy crashed into it from the side, knocking it headfirst into the wall with a blood-curdling yell, where it was ensnared by the curtains. He cast around for anything they could use to knock the creature out, but the only thing small enough to swing but large enough to hurt was the stool currently holding one terrified old woman. He grabbed a candle instead, hoping the flame would at least keep the thing away from him but pleading silently he wouldn’t have to burn his friend in the process. He saw his girlfriend do the same as the creature ripped itself out of the draperies. 

It smiled sadistically, bouncing on the balls of its feet. “Oh, candles. That’s funny. Ya know I could just blow ‘em out, right?” He puffed a bit of red smoke in their direction, and the small flames flickered slightly in the draft. “Anyways, I just wanted a little payback, there’s no need for senseless violence. I’ll be going now, though I do wish ya luck on your search. I know how successful it’s been so far.” He giggled evilly, then turned to the plainly petrified psychic, who seemed to have turned to stone and fused to her stool. “Perhaps you should rethink your career. Congratulations on your very first genuine supernatural experience!” He swept them a dramatic bow and collapsed with a shrill wail, mouth billowing crimson smoke. They waved the haze aside and rushed to Ethan’s side, carefully lifting him into one of the armchairs. Mark sat heavily down in the one next to him, rubbing his jaw and still holding his extinguished candle, now with noticeable dents in the wax from how tightly he was gripping it. 

Stella was gasping like a fish with a punctured lung, eyes wide as golf balls and necklaces jangling as she trembled. She pointed one shaking finger at the unconscious man, a large topaz ring clattering to the floor.

“I want him out!” she yelled, voice cracking massively mid-shout. “There are bad things at work here, begone, begone!” He stirred slightly, and she shrieked in a mixture of terror and indignation. “Delia! Delia, get in here, I want them ouuuut!” 

He sat up, blinking sleepily and looking around in confusion. Mark wrapped him in a quick hug as the receptionist burst into the room, panting lightly. She drew in a sharp breath as she caught sight of them, hand still frozen on the doorknob.

“Oh, dear. Come, quickly, or she’ll become hysterical and I’ll have to cancel the rest of today’s appointments.” They did not protest, and she ushered them quickly back into the foyer, Ethan with an arm around Amy for support. “Look, whatever happened in there is none of my business, but you’ve got the old hag in a proper tizzy.” They offered sheepish apologies, which she waved off. “Happens on a regular basis. This one was worse than most, though.” She looked them up and down with a scathing eye. “Please wait here for one moment, I have something I need to give you.”

She disappeared into the back again, and they helped a groggy Ethan into the nearest chair. 

“What could she possibly be getting us?” he questioned them. 

“No clue.” she replied. She gave a dry chuckle. “Maybe a crucifix and a jar of holy water.”

“More likely a dream catcher.” Mark winced as he moved his jaw. 

“You okay, buddy?”

“I’m fine.”

“Lies are not becoming,” Delia interjected. In one hand she held a small golden card, and in her other was a bag of frozen peas, which she handed to him.

“For your jaw.”

“How did you-”

“I know a little more than I let on. A direct hit to the chin is no picnic.” 

“ _I punched you in the face?_ ”

“I said I’m fine.”

“Take the peas anyways.” 

He reluctantly pressed the frozen bag to his chin as Ethan shot him a grief-stricken glance. 

She turned to Amy and placed the little golden card into her hand. “Look, I don’t refer many people, but your problem appears to be more serious than most. Go to this address and ask for Albert. He’s my brother. He’ll be able to help you. Despite what the world believes, there are still a few of us left.”

“Thank you so much,” she said. “We’re willing to try anything at this point. Wait, did you say _us_? Could you help?”

“No. This problem is way out of my depth. My skill set is rather simple; I read relationships and physical afflictions, and I project moods. But not much else.”

“Wait, is that how Stella knew we were dating?”

“And my allergy?”

“Yes. You two were practically glowing when you came in. And allergies are as obvious as bad cologne.”

“Oh.” Ethan was unsure if he was supposed to be offended or not. 

“ _Delia!_ ” Stella howled from the back.

“You need to leave now. She’ll be livid if she hears I ‘tainted the aura’ of her shop by helping you all. Don’t worry about paying, she’ll think it’s cursed and won’t take it.”

As she practically pushed them onto the street, they earnestly repeated their thanks and apologies. She nodded in acknowledgement, muttered “you’re welcome,” and slammed the door, the wind chime clanging behind her. 

“Well, that was kind of a success,” Amy remarked. “At least we have a slightly better lead now.” Mark grunted his agreement, unwilling to talk through the makeshift ice pack. Ethan paled slightly and shifted his feet at the reminder of the injury. 

“Sorry,” he mumbled guiltily. 

“S’not your fault.”

“So should we go find this Albert guy?” she proposed.

“I think it’s a better option than-” Ethan glanced at their list, “Sophie’s Spectral Spectacular.”

“And Delia said part of her abilities was projecting moods. Remember that happy feeling we all got when we came in? I think she was telling the truth,” she added. “Plus, what has she got to gain by leading us on?”

Mark voiced his support with another grunt.


	6. Chapter 6

The address on the gilded card was, unfortunately, over an hour away and appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. They were lucky Amy’s phone even recognized its existence. Much to their surprise, it belonged to an old mechanic’s garage, miles away from anything resembling civilization or a potential customer. _At least it wasn’t a cave or the home base of some psycho cult,_ she thought. The shop itself had only enough room for a single car, but the rest of the building looked quite a bit larger. It was spotlessly cleaned and the concrete floors were freshly washed, despite its run-down appearance. They cautiously peeked into the immaculate space, currently empty of vehicles, but it appeared deserted and there weren’t any lights on. 

“Are we sure this is the right place?” she wondered. 

“It is according to the GPS, at least,” her boyfriend confirmed. “I don’t see anyone, though.”

“Why, hello there!” a friendly voice said from behind them. They spun around in surprise to see a wizened old man in overalls and dirty work boots standing on the gravel driveway, frazzled-looking silver hair threatening escape from a weathered baseball cap. “What brings you out here to my garage? _No, mine._ Shut up.” He rolled his eyes. 

They gazed at him with curiosity and a bit of concern. 

“We’re looking for Albert,” she explained. 

“Well, you’re talking to him. _No, you’re not._ Yes, they are. Will you be quiet! No. Yes! You’re scaring them.” He swatted the side of his own head, like smacking an invisible fly. “ _Argh, fine. No need to get pushy._ ” He heaved a sigh and shook his head a little. “Sorry about that, folks. What can I do for you?”

Alarm bells were going off all over the place. “Are you all right, sir?” she asked.

“Oh, I’m fine. _No voices here._ All good. I just have a friend. Harmless, I promise. And please call me Albert.”

She eyed him a little askance, and he gave her a grin big enough to belong to a cartoon character. Which was not nearly as reassuring as it is in cartoons. Mark shook off some of his nerves, pushing aside the persistent cycle of “voices means crazy means you _leave_ ” and pressed forward. 

“We were sent here by a woman named Delia who said you could help us.”

Amy presented him with the small golden card, which he examined with interest before ripping it in half and stuffing it into his mouth without a second thought. They stared incredulously as he vigorously chewed the tough paper into a pulp, seemingly unaware that anything he had just done was in any way unusual. The alarm bells escalated into sirens. 

“Oh, Delia,” he said around a mouthful of glittery cardstock. “I haven’t heard from her in ages. _Me neither._ She still working for that old bat?” They nodded, watching him swallow the last of the paper in disbelief. “ _Waste of talent if you ask me._ I didn’t. Now, why don’t you come inside and we’ll sort this out together?”

He slipped into the garage, whistling cheerily and not bothering to wait for their answer. The trio shared worried looks, a lot of extremely valid concerns running through their heads. 

“Well… Delia sent us here, so she must trust him, right?” she said.

“He just ate a business card like a cracker and he talks to voices in his head,” Mark insisted. “That _talk back_ to him. And we don’t even know if we can trust Delia. I’m not super sure I want to just waltz into his hideout.”

“We’re out of options,” Ethan pointed out, determination in his eyes. “This is the best clue we’ve had in two days. And at this point, I’ve got nothing to lose. I’m going in, voices or no voices.” He disappeared without another word. The couple hesitantly followed him, not about to leave him alone with a potential lunatic. 

Albert stood in the exact center of the garage, hands clasped behind his back and rocking back and forth on the tips of his toes. 

“Excellent. I figured you’d follow. _You must be pretty desperate to ask for his help._ I said be quiet, they already think I’m nuts.” He spun on his heels and twirled to a small, faded blue door in the back, throwing it wide and revealing a dim and narrow hallway. “After you.” 

Ethan strode forward with no indecision, but Mark caught his hand. 

“Are we really trusting this guy?” he said softly.

“Yes. I want my life back. What’s the likelyhood any of the places left on our list can actually help us? This guy may have a screw or two loose, but the woman who sent us here certainly didn’t seem to and he’s the best chance we’ve got.”

“Okay, then. I trust your judgement.” He shored up his confidence, and Amy took his hand comfortingly. “Let’s do this.”

“I didn’t hear any of that,” Albert said, twiddling his thumbs and waiting impatiently. “ _Yes, you did, he called you crazy._ Shut up, I’m not crazy.”

As the four of them walked down the dingy corridor, it got brighter and brighter until it gave way to a cozy and inviting little den, complete with a fruit bowl on the coffee table, a baby-blue blue rug, and a pair of plush beige couches. The only slightly unusual thing about the whole place were the miscellaneous sheets of paper scattered in copious amounts over various surfaces. 

“Please, sit down. Now, first off, I am a medium. I figured you must already know this, hence why you are here. _Why else would they have driven out to the middle of this ridiculously isolated desert?_ Shush. I will not bamboozle you or feed you lies like Stella and all the rest of those swindlers. I will, however, need absolute honesty if we are to reach a resolution to whatever problem is so dreadful that my dear, down-to-earth sister would send you to me.”

As he talked, he rummaged around in a chest of drawers in the back of the room, stuffing several random paper scraps into his mouth as he searched. “Nothing quite like paper for charging the third eye,” he explained around a mouthful of post-its. “I had to pick a focus object when I was little, and paper was the clear choice. _Yeah, everyone wants to spend their whole lives eating smashed and dried out trees._ I don’t understand people’s aversion to it. Marvelous stuff. A-ha!”

He triumphantly held up a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with extraordinarily thick lenses. “Haven’t had to use these in forever. _You used them last month to read me that novel._ Ah, you’re right, I’d quite forgotten.” He perched himself on the arm of the couch next to Amy, the lenses distorting his eyes so that they appeared much larger than normal. He studied each of them intently. “Now, you lot probably think I’m off my rocker. _And they’d be right._ No they wouldn’t. I swear to you I’m not mad, if you’d kindly ignore the voice of my late wife. She lingers around here, and she has no respect for my personal boundaries. _Oh, hush up, you let me in yourself._ ”

“Your late wife?” she said in disbelief.

“Oh, yes. Cancer, a couple years ago. Terribly sad. Wanted to live out her days here, why I’ll never understand. _You would if you ever listened to me._ All I ever do is listen to you. So, let me try and figure out why you’re here. I’d like to retrieve the story myself, if you don’t mind. I hate prejudice. Can I have permission to look at your minds? I promise I’ll stay away from anything you don’t want me seeing; it’s very obvious in the brain where I’m not welcome.”

“It won’t hypnotize us or anything?” Ethan asked.

“Heavens, no. I detest such paltry party tricks. I’ll simply look at your memories from the past few days and piece together an accurate reconstruction of events. _Quick and simple, he could do it in his sleep._ No adverse effects at all.” They hesitantly agreed. 

“Excellent. I read by touch, not sight like Delia, so I will need your palm. The lady first, if you please.”

He took her hand and slowly started tracing the complex creases in her palm. “Please close your eyes for me, ma’am.” 

Mark watched nervously as the medium’s pupils shrunk down to tiny dots, leaving only huge green irises that were very disturbing to look at. Only a few seconds had passed before his pupils rapidly grew to normal size and she opened her eyes. 

“Oh, that was very strange. Did it work?”

“Yes, quite well. I must compliment you on your exceptionally unbiased perception of events. _Why can’t I ever see?_ Because you’re not welcome in other people's heads. Will you go next, Mark?”

“I never told you my-”

“Yes, but you’ve certainly told Amy.”

Mark took a deep breath. “Oh. All right.” As he closed his eyes and Albert started rubbing gentle circles on his hand, he felt for a few moments like he was floating in a cloud of white nothing, curious breezes whistling around his face and hands. His head felt very… crowded, he supposed, like there was more stuffed into it then there ever should be. There was no other way to really describe it. It wasn’t uncomfortable, per se, but it certainly was weird. Then the feeling left and he found himself staring at a pair of massive olive eyes that strongly reminded him of an owl’s. The old man patted his shoulder with an expression filled with empathy. 

“Try not to be so hard on yourself. It’s not worth beating yourself up over something you have no control over. _What happened?_ Shush, I’ll tell you later. You did everything possible, and hope’s not gone yet.” Mark stared at him in astonishment, then at his feet. It was unsettling to have his innermost thoughts exposed to this strange man. “Now, to the source of our little problem.” He turned to Ethan, who shrunk back slightly. “With your permission, I’ll take a peek around in that noggin of yours and figure out just how serious of a threat we’re dealing with.”

He steeled himself. “Okay.” The medium took his wrist and started tracing lazy lines up and down his arm, and he closed his eyes nervously. He couldn’t feel the couch beneath him anymore, and it was very dark and cold. He shivered and hoped it would be over quickly, but at least five minutes passed and the ordeal showed no signs of ending. He started hearing muffled bangs and explosions, but everything sounded distant and muddled, like he was deep underwater. He tried to propel himself towards the source of the commotion, but it was so dark he had no idea if he was making progress or not. The sounds never got any closer. He flailed wildly, trying to find anything solid in the seemingly empty void. Yelling into the emptiness was useless; the sound never even reached his ears. It was like the vacuum of space, just more terrifying and less deadly. His brain was running in anxious claustrophobic circles that made him want to flee as far away as possible, but trying to run at the moment was about as helpful as an ice cube thrown into a bonfire to put it out. 

Some primal instinct kept him paddling like a drowning swimmer against the terror, and eventually his hand struck something scaly and pliable, about as big around as a bathroom pipe. He wrapped his arms around it, desperate for anything vaguely connected to the real world. As he clung tightly to the rough skin, it pulsed slightly in his grip before starting to curl around his waist like a boa constrictor and beginning to squeeze. He pulled it off in a panic, untangling the intrusive arm as fast as he could as it tried to ensnare him in its grasp. He kicked off of a particularly thick portion and went spinning off in a random direction, quickly losing any sense of up or down in the disorienting darkness. He forcefully careened into another tentacle, this one as thick as a large tree trunk. The collision knocked the wind out of him, and he gasped for breath as the massive limb shuddered and twitched to life. He pushed weakly away from it, but it scooped him up in a massive embrace that he could do nothing but pound his fists against. He screamed silently into nothing as he felt the thing wrap around his legs and constrict against his chest.

“Stop!” The massive word punched through the darkness, and the arm quivered violently before releasing him. He panted, shaking with relief as a wrinkled hand reached out of nothing and grabbed onto the cuff of his jeans. It pulled him through the tear in the void, and he rushed back into consciousness. He caught sight of his friends hovering around him with worried expressions, then his eyes rolled back and he promptly fainted.

┈┈┈┈┈

After everything they’d seen the demon do, watching Albert delve into Ethan’s mind to purposefully seek it out was very nerve-wracking for the other two. The medium’s pupils shrunk to the size of pencil dots, and after a minute or so they began to worry about what could possibly be taking so long. Sweat started beading on their friend’s brow and he started taking shallow, sipping breaths, but the medium kept taking long, rattling drafts of air at precise, fifteen second intervals. His brow furrowed, and his hold on the other man’s arm switched from brushing light rows up and down his forearm to a fierce two handed grip that left his knuckles white and his face pinched. After an excruciatingly long time, Albert’s pupils dilated to ridiculous proportions and he abruptly released Ethan’s arm to grab onto his pant leg instead. He yanked, hard, and they ran over, just managing to catch the pair as they tumbled to the floor.

The medium was back up on his feet in an instant, brushing off Amy’s concerned questions and kneeling down in front of Ethan, who was still unconscious. He checked his eyes, which were mercifully still hazel. Then, with no warning whatsoever, the old man slapped him across the cheek. Mark cried out in protest, but now Ethan’s eyes were open, albeit unfocused. They wandered around independent of each other, but for just a second they fixated on the three people clustered around him before rolling completely back into his head. He fell limp in Mark’s arms. 

“Oh, dear. That’s not good. Not good at all. _Yeah, no kidding, you old coot._ We have to move now. Get him onto the couch.” 

They hoisted their friend’s slack form onto the sofa. A small trickle of scarlet vapor escaped his lips. Albert studied him with a frown, nibbling daintily on a piece of notebook paper from the coffee table, before pointing straight at Mark. “You. Slap him.”

“What?” Mark asked, shocked. 

“He knows you. It’ll be a bigger wake-up call than if I do it. Chop-chop.”

“I’m not going to hit my best friend.”

“You will if you want him to still be your best friend when he wakes up.”

Mark hesitantly shut his eyes, tried to imagine he was slapping Blank instead of Ethan, and smacked him. He yelled in pain, and Mark nervously opened one eye to see him sitting up and rubbing his cheek. 

“What was that for?”

“You fainted again. Thank goodness that worked.”

“Why’d you have to slap me out of it, though?”

“Ask the kooky paper-eater.”

The man in question had sprinted to the back of the room and was now rooting through the jumble of files and knick-knacks, furiously cramming bits of paper into his mouth. He scooped up as many sheets as he could hold and dumped them onto the coffee table, mumbling unintelligibly. The trio watched anxiously from the couch. After no less than four full pieces of paper had disappeared into his stomach, he burped loudly and looked over at the pair of them. 

“I may have accidentally angered the little monster he’s got living in there when I inserted myself into his head. _Nice going, you old fart._ Shut up, it was an accident. Now it has sped up its takeover. We have to get back in there fast. It’s going after his personality now, so if you want to remain any sort of version of yourself we have to get that thing out of you immediately.” 

“Why on earth would you go into his head if you knew this could happen?” Mark said angrily. “You said there were no adverse effects.”

“I severely underestimated what we were dealing with. I expected a low-level demon who would be cowed or at the very least wary of my presence in his psyche, but instead I got an arrogant, overpowered beast hell-bent on pushing me back out before I could get to your friend. _You’re getting cocky in your old age._ I know, and I’m sorrier for it.” He stuffed another half-sheet into his mouth and turned to him and Amy. “Now, I need to connect one of you to his brain to get rid of the creature. If I go in myself, it’ll recognize me in a heartbeat and kick me back out again. One of you has a much better chance of flying under the radar for at least a little while. The other needs to stay behind and act as an anchor to tie us to the real world. Who’s it going to be?”

“I’ll go,” Mark said immediately. 

“And I’ll be the anchor.” Amy added.

“Excellent. Follow me.”

“What do I need to do while they’re in my head?”

“For all our sakes, remain yourself. I might not be able to fish you out a second time.”

He walked back to the chest of drawers and pulled open the bottom drawer, which had previously remained untouched. A horrible grinding noise echoed through the room as the large dresser slid back into the wall, revealing another dingy passageway. He led them down the cramped corridor, whipping a flashlight out of who knows where as the hallway got darker. A rusted metal door waited at the end of the passage, which he wrenched open with a grating screech. They crowded into a small room furnished only with four plain wooden chairs and a single dim light bulb exposed on the ceiling. 

“Better concentration in here,” he offered. “I’ve had another psychic bless the area. _Why don’t you ever tell them that it was me?_ Fine, it was her. Please sit down, Amy in between the two of you.”

After they had seated themselves, he took the remaining chair and started delivering rapid-fire instructions. 

“Once you’re in there, the only one that can help you is yourself or Ethan, if he’s not incapacitated yet. Both of you will take the form of your own physical bodies. Your goal is to get in, eliminate whatever it is that is attacking him, and get back out. This should get rid of the demonic presence. You need to be as quick as you can. Extended time spent in someone else’s head risks personality transfer.”

“What will I be fighting and how on earth do I fight it?”

“There’s no telling what specifically it will be, only that it will be an obvious threat manufactured by Blank. As for weapons, you have whatever Ethan’s imagination can provide you with subconsciously. _Tell him about moving._ Oh, yes. You can’t move like you do in the temporal world. You propel yourself through thought.”

“What do I do?”

“You are the anchor. You ground him to the real world. You are to hold onto him like his life depends on it, because his sanity does. Under no circumstances are you to let go of him while he is in the trance. You are the only thing keeping him attached to this world, since he has no psychic powers to pull himself out without a direct line to his body.”

“And my job is to not get possessed.”

“Precisely. It would be less than ideal if you were to be taken over while you are in the trance. _That’s an understatement._ However, you are also to help Mark fight Blank if you can. There is honestly no telling what you will encounter upon entering the connection, but you will likely already be partially trapped or injured.” 

“What happens if it does take control?”

“Then we pray to whatever deity you believe in. I am powerless to prevent such an occurrence.” The trio paled slightly. “But we must proceed or face worse consequences. While I am connecting you two, I am quite literally a mental bridge. I will be, essentially, comatose. So will the two of you. _Only he can wake you up, so don’t try to do it yourselves._ You, Amy will be the only one conscious while the connection is active. I will create and break the connection myself, but that’s the only thing I can do. Is everyone clear?” They all nodded, with varying degrees of confidence. 

“As clear as we can be,” she said.

“Then let’s get started. Ethan, Mark, make sure you won’t fall out of your chairs when you go under. Amy, grab onto his wrist. Remember we have to move fast. This thing is not going to be happy that we’re in there.”

Albert’s pupils enlarged and he stiffened in his chair, mouth clenched in a thin line. He robotically reached out a single finger, leaning over and tapping the two men’s foreheads. They fell slack in their chairs, and Amy was left alone. 

She clutched her boyfriend’s wrist firmly, trying to calm herself as her mind buzzed with all the ways things could go horribly awry. Her anxiety grew exponentially with every passing minute. After the longest five minutes of her life, the sound of mumbling reached her ears, and she turned to see Ethan murmuring softly, though she couldn’t make out what he was saying. She prayed that things weren’t going wrong. Ethan’s mumbling got louder and more warped, then he screamed like he was being murdered and she almost released Mark’s wrist from terror. She fearfully studied Ethan; he was twitching slightly and only the whites of his eyes were showing. As she watched, they started to swirl with tendrils of darkness.

“Oh, that’s great. Wonderful. Crap.” She was going to have to fend the demon off while also protecting the other two, and she may as well be handcuffed to one of them. There was nothing in the room she could use to defend herself, except perhaps the bulky wooden chairs. She wasn’t sure if she could lift one one-handed, but it was all she had. As the darkness continued to swirl in his eyes, she stood up and tried to lift the unwieldy thing. It wasn’t terribly hard to manage, but it was cumbersome and was not going to make a great weapon. _Well, this is quite the predicament,_ she mused. _Though I guess all I really need to do is find a way to either knock him out or pin him, not have an extended fight._ She studied the chair again. It had no crossbar between the legs, and it looked like it was about the breadth of Ethan’s torso. Moving quickly, she grabbed his arm and lowered him to the floor, then situated the chair on top of him so that it (hopefully) pinned him to the floor. She knelt on top of the chair, holding Mark at arm’s length so that he was out of Ethan’s reach and wouldn’t fall out of his seat. 

Just as she got situated, his eyes blackened completely and he shrieked, flailing wildly. The chair bucked a bit under her, and she remembered with dismay the ease with which the monster had thrown Mark across the kitchen before. However, the creature only seemed capable of rocking the chair slightly, and she hoped it was a sign they were winning the fight against it. The monster was trapped, but, unfortunately, it could still reach her ankles hanging off the edge of the chair. Its nails repeatedly raked viciously across her skin. She gasped in pain and clenched her teeth, the angry rocking of the chair keeping her just off balance enough that she couldn’t change her position. She silently pleaded with Mark to hurry as Blank’s garbled nonsense kicked up a notch.


	7. Chapter 7

When Mark opened his eyes, he was surrounded by a whiteness so bright it was almost painful to look at. He tried to shield his eyes, but it made no difference since it was coming from everywhere at once. As his eyes adjusted to the brilliance, he began to see small bright blurs of colored light whizzing by him. They were a variety of bright, vibrant colors, but few in number. One flew straight towards him, and he tried to duck out of the way, but his limbs didn’t seem to be working properly and it blasted him straight in the face. A kaleidoscope of colors flooded his vision, and a memory of driving in the car together the day before was thrown to the front of his mind with such force it was almost painful. Only, it wasn’t his perspective. He was staring at himself from the backseat. _These must be the last of Ethan’s memories,_ he decided. 

He tried moving his arms again, but he couldn’t get them to cooperate. _Oh, wait, I move by thought, right?_ He tried consciously telling his arm to move, and it obediently lifted and smacked him hard in the nose. He internally flinched, but it didn’t hurt at all. This place was definitely not operating by normal rules. _Okay,_ he thought, _I need to find Ethan. How do I get out of here?_ He told his head to look around the space, but he didn’t see a door or anything except the endless whiteness. _Maybe if I think of a way out?_

No sooner had the idea entered his head then a dilapidated wooden door appeared out of nowhere in front of him. He tugged it open and thought himself through, entering what looked like a grimy sewer pipe. He hung in the air in the center of it; gravity apparently followed its own made-up rules in the brain. At least there were actual walls now. 

He navigated carefully down the pipe, heading for a faint light around a corner. As he rounded the turn, getting more confident in controlling his own appendages, he stopped dead in shock. Before him was a huge black void, and Ethan floated in the middle of the expanse, ensnared by a massive tangle of crimson tentacles stretching up from an unknown point far below them. He was pulling the things off of himself as fast as he could, but it was clear he was fighting a losing battle as more of them reached up menacingly out of the nothingness. He caught sight of Mark, and hope sparked in his eyes.

“Help me!” he yelled, near hysterical.

Mark shot over and started frantically yanking the scaly monstrosities off of his friend, but they started winding themselves around Ethan again as soon as they were removed, and their numbers were growing. 

“Didn’t Albert say you’d have weapons?”

“I don’t have any!”

“Well then think one up!”

He squeezed his eyes shut and thought desperately for anything to help him, a sword, a flamethrower, _anything._

“You’re glowing!”

He opened his eyes and saw that he was, indeed, suffused with a soft white light. As he gazed wonderingly at his hands, the glow around them intensified. He grabbed one of the tentacles, and it writhed and smoked in his grasp, withering away to ash. _Oh, I can work with this._ He set to work scorching as many as he could, and they started gaining ground. Ethan’s whole torso was free now, and Mark was now almost completely accustomed to controlling his own limbs like a video-game avatar. 

Just as it looked like they were actually going to win, the arms re-doubled their efforts, growing thicker and stronger and sprouting up in droves. They started fighting him as well as going after their prey, and his illuminated hands were not nearly as effective against the tentacles hurtling towards him at immense speeds, some as thick as tree trunks. A particularly vicious one sent him wheeling away from his friend and slammed him into the edge of the entrance pipe, and the others used the brief respite to swarm Ethan, swiftly smothering his scream of terror as Mark struggled to fend off the one pinning him to the pipe. His hands only seared its tough armored surface, and he fought fiercely to free himself as his friend disappeared from view.

“ _No!_ ” he screamed as Ethan vanished completely beneath the writhing mass. His body burned white-hot with his anger, and the arm trapping him disintegrated in the fiery blast. He threw himself at the tight-knit knot of arms, but for every one he burned two more took his place. _This is hopeless,_ he thought, crimson burning to black with every touch but never getting closer to his friend. _I can’t do it. Now it’s really my fault. They just keep coming… wait._ What if he could get to the source? They were sprouting from somewhere. He dove downwards, dragging his hand down the length of whatever tentacle he could reach and incinerating everything he touched. He pushed himself faster and faster, but they seemed to extend downward for forever. There had to be a source. This couldn’t be the end. They were so close. He wasn’t going to lose his friend to this demon. 

Suddenly, he saw ground rushing up to meet him, and he barely managed to avoid slamming face-first into it, skidding to a stop barely two feet above it. The corrupted ground was a dark maroon and covered with blemishes and the bases of the grotesque crimson tentacles, creating the illusion of a dense forest of twisted trees. It pulsed gently, undulating like ocean waves. Mark slammed his incandescent hands into it with everything he had, but all he left were a pair of black burn marks that faded after a few seconds. He wailed against the unyielding surface, but nothing he did made any sort of indent. He was so unbelievably angry, he knew that he was strong enough, he had to be strong enough. If he destroyed this, he would win his friend’s life back. He hurled himself into it again and again, and a hideous laugh resonated through the darkness. A splinter of fear pricked his heart. A horribly distorted mockery of Ethan’s voice carried through the air.

“It’s over. You failed your best friend,” it taunted. He faltered slightly, the splinter piercing a little deeper. “He’s _mine_ now. All that optimism and hope, it was _delicious_. Maybe ya could have saved him if you got there sooner. Oh, what could have been if _you_ were _better_. But you were _too late._ ”

Mark weaky rammed his shoulder into the ground, tears blurring his vision and his glow flickering into nothing. 

“You will _never_ be strong enough.”

He crumpled into a heap, sobbing bitterly. It was _right_ , and he hated the demon all the more for it. It was his fault, his friend was gone, suffocated under the weight and power of the corruption towering above him. How could he have thought he could win. He couldn’t even faze Blank when it was in Ethan’s body, and now he was fighting it in its own territory. He closed his eyes and clutched his knees to his chest, overwhelmed with guilt and despair. He thought of his best times with Ethan. He recalled their first meeting at the convention, of all the things they’d created together, and love for his best friend burned in his heart. He couldn’t lose that. He wouldn’t. He was not going to go down like this. Maybe he deserved this. But Ethan didn’t. 

A beautiful warmth blossomed in his chest and slowly flowed through him, filling him with a feeling of strength and power. His fear burned away in the face of his determination. He felt charged, like lightning, and he opened his eyes to see every vein in his body glowing an intense blue. 

Hope rekindled within him, and he concentrated on his hands, trying to grow the light. An electrifying pulse ran through him, and a radiant azure dagger coalesced in his grip. Without a second thought, he plunged the blade deep into the corruption beneath him. A drawn-out shriek of fury and pain buffeted his eardrums, and he dragged the knife along the ground, leaving a deep gash in the leathery surface. He hacked at it with all of his strength, driving the dagger deeper and deeper with every cut and swiftly dispatching any tentacles trying to slow his progress. This fight was not over yet. He savagely slashed his way through it, and the thick skin gave way to a huge cavern, swarming with thousands and thousands of the multi-colored memory breezes he’d seen before. He clambered inside and stared around him in awe.

“They’re still here,” he breathed, as a memory of Spencer tickled his ear and Ethan’s twenty-first birthday celebration wrapped around his ankle. The memories were all here. He was staring at Ethan, every defining experience that made him into his wonderful best friend. A small lilac breeze whispered against his cheek, and he was pitched into the memory. 

It was the three of them, sitting on the kitchen tile. His own voice floated through his mind. “An accident means that it’s no one’s fault.” No one’s fault. But it was his fault. “Not your fault,” the memory murmured. He felt the relief the memory carried, the love emanating from everyone, the forgiveness given and accepted without words and when there was no need to be forgiven. Not your fault. He didn’t think he could believe his own words. Not his fault. Not his fault? Tears ran freely down his face as the lavender cloud danced around him as he fought a different battle against the demon, one to destroy its words. Not his fault. Maybe the mistake wasn’t his. Maybe Amy was right. He needed to let go of the blame. He was going to rescue Ethan. Not to earn forgiveness or repay wrongdoings. To save his best friend. His best friend that he loved and who loved him right back. 

He attacked the corruption with renewed vigor, enlarging the hole from the inside out so the memories could escape, but they were blocked by the thick red tentacles. Mark slashed the scaly arms away and pushed his way back through the opening, letting the memories speed upwards towards Ethan, lighting up the darkness like fireworks. Beautiful, hopeful fireworks. As more and more darted past him to freedom, the crimson tentacles fought harder and more desperately to stop him, and the ground under him shrivelled and blackened. The never-ending howl of the demon tore throbbingly through him in near-paralyzing pulses. He would never go down. He wouldn’t let himself. He pushed doggedly on, stabbing and slicing until every last memory had escaped and the pulsing skin of the corruption was nothing more than an ashy desert. He dropped to his knees, breathing heavily, as the agonizing scream petered out at last. The gleaming dagger faded to nothing in his grasp as he staggered back to his feet. He felt lighter. Maybe he could forgive himself. It wasn’t too late. 

Rising up in pursuit of the freed memories, he found them flocking in droves around the blackened ball of corruption that held their owner. He carefully cleared the crumbling cocoon away with his blue-veined hands, uncovering an unconscious Ethan. He tugged him out of the decaying shell, and the memories happily whistled around his ears as he carefully carried his friend back to the white expanse where the glittering flurries had first greeted him. As he closed the door behind the last of the memories, the portal vanished without a trace. 

He worriedly took hold of Ethan’s shoulders, watching his friend’s face for any sign of life. Neither of them had a pulse he could check in this place. A tear ran down his cheek as minutes ticked by and he showed no signs of waking up, and he pulled him into a tight hug. He couldn’t have been too late. He wasn’t gone. He couldn’t be. Not after everything they’d been through together. Not when they’d finally won. 

The final remnants of the blue fire flowing through his veins pulsed, pooling into the fingers pressed into his friend’s back. Sparks danced down his arms. The energy flowed out of him and into the other man, hissing and crackling, then vanished completely. He waited with bated breath. 

Ethan drew in a shuddering breath.

“Oh, thank goodness,” he whispered. 

“Hey, man,” he mumbled. “Did we win?”

More tears fell, this time from relief. “Yes. We did. It’s gone.”

“I can remember now. Oh, oh my goodness, I can remember everything. This is amazing. Thank you, Mark. Thank you for everything.”

Mark could do nothing but cry happily as their vision blurred to white.

┈┈┈┈┈

The first thing he saw when he jolted back into himself was his girlfriend’s tear-streaked face. He brushed a droplet from her cheek, and her lips split in a joyful smile. She tackled him in a hug, nearly knocking both of them to the floor. He kissed her hair and they held each other, laughing and crying all at once.

“You’re safe, oh thank goodness, you’re safe.”

“Yes. We both are. We defeated Blank. Is Ethan awake yet?”

She nervously looked behind her, and he saw Ethan pinned beneath one of the heavy wooden chairs, still out cold. 

“Woah, what happened?”

“It possessed him while you were under.”

“What! Are you okay?”

“It’s really not that bad-”

“What did it do?”

She sat down on the chair without a person under it and pulled up her pant legs, exposing at least two dozen red scratch marks, some of them oozing blood. 

“It could still reach my legs while it was pinned. It did a number on my ankles before I could tuck them under me. They really don’t hurt that much, I promise.”

“Oh, Amy, I’m so sorr-”

“Don’t be,” she interrupted. She saw the guilt starting to gather in his face, but then it cleared.

“Okay,” he said. “Are you really all right?” She kissed him. 

“Yes. I am. Now help me get the other two up.”

They lifted Ethan back into his chair, and checked on Albert, who somehow hadn’t budged an inch during the entire ordeal. Just as they were debating whether or not slapping them again was a good idea, the two men jerked back to life. The pair crushed Ethan in a hug as the medium brushed himself off and performed mental inventory. 

“Sorry for the delay, you two, I needed to straighten out the last of the knots in his subconscious. _Stop fooling around in your own head and get that poor girl some bandages._ Oh, Amy, my goodness, I apologize. Please wait here.”

Ethan extracted himself slightly and looked worriedly at her. “Are you okay?”

“Blank scratched my ankles up a bit. I’m fine.”

“I’m so-” She shot him a warning glance and he quailed. “I’m sorry it did that to you.”

“Better.” She grinned. “I want the full story of whatever happened later, but right now I’m so glad you’re back that it would just fly over my head. You are back, right, Ethan?”

“Yes,” he said gladly. “It’s all back.”

They heard the door creak open and turned to see Albert, bits of paper sticking out of the corners of his mouth and a pair of rolled bandages in hand. “Come back out to the workspace and you can wash those claw marks out,” he instructed. The trio untangled themselves and followed the medium all the way back out to the garage, where there was a large metal sink. As she washed her ankles and bandaged them up, he interrogated the other two what happened during the connection. Ethan related what he’d seen, but he had been unconscious for most of it and had to pass most of the questions on to Mark. Her boyfriend curled in on himself a little, giving vague descriptions and one-word answers. He found himself avoiding the more painful parts of what happened, not wanting to relive the memories and unwilling to reveal his own thoughts. She listened worriedly from the side, finishing wrapping the bandage around her leg. It occurred to her that she had been so glad he was safe that she hadn’t even considered what he might have just gone through. 

“You don’t have to go into it if it’s too much right now,” she interrupted, earning an annoyed look from the medium. “Look, it may be scientifically interesting to you, but we have had a horrible past couple days and he’s clearly uncomfortable.” 

He shot her a grateful glance. “And I’m sleep-deprived,” he volunteered half-heartedly. 

“Why can’t you just go into our heads and see the memories like you did before?”

The psychic blinked slowly, then smacked himself on the forehead in exasperation. “Ah, I’m such a dunce. You are quite right. And I have to do a quick mental check up on you all as well, make sure none of Ethan went back attached to Mark. If that’s okay with you all?” They nodded in relief. She pulled her sneakers back on, and they walked back through the blue door to the den to finish this whole thing.

┈┈┈┈┈

The first thing they did when they got back to Ethan’s house was to take an axe to the orange sapling that had caused the problem in the first place. The branches that had previously thrashed wildly were now hanging limp, and the ground around it was littered with crinkly brown leaves. There was no sign of the fruit it had borne before. It looked dead already, and the whole tree was very brittle and breakable. They probably could have taken it down with their bare hands if they wanted to. After burning the blackened wood, they carefully covered the ground where it used to grow with stones, marking the spot so they wouldn’t accidentally dig there again. Who knew what else was lurking down there.

Amy grinned impishly as she dropped the last rock in place. “Orange you glad we cut this down?”

“Oh my goodness. My garden had a demon buried in it and you’re making tree puns again.”

Swiftly hiding his grin, Mark asked, “Why don’t you just move?” 

“Cause I just moved here a few months ago and I don’t know if my bank account could take it. Plus, this way no one else will move in and be cursed with the desire to plant something here.”

“Suit yourself. My door’s always open if you decide you want out.”

He laughed. “Will do.”

Mark bumped his shoulder and smirked slyly. “Your desire to stay here has me stumped.” 

Ethan buried his face in his hands to hide the smile fighting to surface. “This humor is the pits.”

“Oranges have seeds, not pits.”

“Shut up, I know.” 

“Are you going to be good staying here?” Amy asked. “You really could spend the night at our place if you want.”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. Hey, Mark?”

“Mm?”

“I remembered that before all this, we were supposed to film a video tomorrow. Will I see you then?”

Mark beamed, putting all of the stress from the past few days behind him at last. “See you then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! It's great seeing people leave kudos and knowing that people are seeing this. I'd love if you could leave a comment telling me something you liked or something I could improve upon!


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